


Sons of War

by erebones



Series: Danse Macabre [4]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Friends to Lovers, Gore, Graphic Depictions of Illness, M/M, Post-Blight, Torture, Violence, Warden Carver Hawke, Warden Felix Alexius, blight sickness, gross blight stuff in general
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-13
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-25 23:12:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4980319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erebones/pseuds/erebones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dorian brings Felix to Skyhold, the Joining spares his life, but at the price of his freedom. Sworn to service as a Grey Warden, Felix finds himself accompanying Carver Hawke on a quest to track down the Hero of Ferelden and uproot the source of the Calling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. join us, brothers and sisters

**Author's Note:**

> This is a tangential series to Danse Macabre, taking place in the same alternate universe but focusing on the friendship (and eventual romance) between Felix Alexius and Carver Hawke. I didn't expect this to happen AT ALL, I wrote Carver into Danse Macabre on a whim and then the rest sort of just happened accidentally, but I'm pretty pleased with the results. As in, I have a new OTP and it's the rarest fucking pair of them all. Oops.
> 
> See the end notes for more descriptive warnings than what I put in the tags.

Carver hates sickrooms. The subtle smell of decay buried under vinegar and lye, tangy elfroot sticking in the back of his throat. The coughing, dry and endless. The oppressive quiet broken by fever-dreams and the whimpers of the dying. It’s too easy to step back in time, into the upstairs room of their home in Lothering where his father lay, wasted into a pissing, shitting, puking shell of his former self. The fever that gripped him painted his family with the faces of demons—his last words to Carver had been hateful, twisted things that dig at his memory even now.

“Ser Warden?”

The healer in attendance looks at him with concern. Carver shrugs her aside and steps fully into the infirmary, trying to breathe shallowly.

“We’re here for the Tevinter.”

Stroud comes in behind him, bearing a small vial in place of the chalice. Deathbed Joinings are the worst, in Carver's opinion: no room for ceremony or gravitas, no dignity. Just desperation and fear. He stands aside as Stroud clears the room with a few words. The Tevinter cannot be moved, but the healer has drawn a curtain around his bed for a modicum of privacy. The only other witnesses are too ill or too comatose to disrupt whatever sanctity of the ritual remains.

“Hold his head up,” Stroud says dispassionately. How many times has he done this, Carver wonders—how many times has he brought the poison to a dead man’s lips and watched it bring a swifter end? Or, perhaps, salvation. It’s the kind of salvation Carver wants no part of, but it’s too late for regrets.

He grips the Tevinter under the jaw, thumb sinking into the loose flesh behind the bone. The Blight sings to him from inside that wasted body—dark veins of it crawl over the Tevinter’s neck and face, and burst beneath the skin around his eyes. His lips are white and cracked, and what little stubble he has left is falling out in patches that litter the pillow with short, wiry curls.

Carver turns his face away as Stroud forces the Tevinter’s mouth open and pours the contents of the vial down his throat. There are no words of Joining spoken, no pomp or circumstance; just the darkspawn blood pooling on a black tongue and dribbling down a slack jaw, a weak cough, and nothing.

“Pulse?” Stroud asks.

Carver's fingers are already buried against the carotid artery. The flutter of the Tevinter’s heart jumps erratically, high-speed, and stills. Carver holds his breath. Then, faintly, a single heartbeat. Another. And again, with such long stretches between them that he’s sure the man is only dying slowly.

The man's eyes fly open suddenly, void-white, and his bloodied mouth gasps a garbled breath. The white fades, leaving twin pupils shrunk to pinpoints in their brown irises, and Carver jerks back at the eerie eye contact. The beat beneath his fingers stills, then steadies, strong and sure, and he leans back with shaking hands and something like relief nestled in his chest.

“Alive.”

///

Felix has been wandering in the dark for a very long time. Infinite twisting passages of flesh direct his steps, mixing up his mind and sticking to his heels. He has fallen more times than he can count, and his hands and knees are smeared with slime and viscera, caking his sleeves and boots with foul rot. His face itches with the specks of backsplash that cling to his skin, but he dares not reach up to wipe it away. Every time he tries, he freezes, staring at the black blood congealing on his fingers and dried beneath his fingernails, and he stops himself.

His mouth is very dry. Everything around him glistens, but it is only a mockery of water. The smell of it turns his stomach, at first—he gags frequently, but swallows back the bile. He can’t afford to lose what little moisture his body is retaining. But gradually he grows accustomed to the stench. He licks his dry lips and tastes only skin and salt, though when he looks down he can see a river of black staining his chin and down his throat like an oil slick.

He can’t remember why he walks, and he doesn’t know why he can’t stop. He is tired. His body aches and festers, every step a chore—he can feel the sores beneath his clothes, and he scratches at them idly as he staggers onward, brushing against the bulbous pink walls when his balance fails him. The hollows of his cheeks are sunken beneath his probing tongue. How long has it been since he last ate? Drank? Slept? His mind flirts with the concepts like a will o’ the wisp, but they hold little meaning here. Wherever _here_ is. But soon, that doesn’t matter either. All that matters is the push, the slide, one foot forward and then another, again, again, rote repetition that he echoes with the nonsensical mumblings of his bloodstained mouth.

Forward. He must go forward.

Perhaps he had been resisting, once. Fighting the taste of death coating his tongue, fighting the pull that drags him like a fish on a line toward the snarling pit of darkness at the center of this maze. He remembers crouching, a weighted anchor wrestling with the tide. He remembers refusing to touch the twisting passages that heave and pulse with blubberous rot, gagging on it, shuddering at the sickly stench. He remembers flinching back from the veins of black blood that run through the walls, feeding them, growing them like a gardener tending its fetid crop.

Now it all seems pointless. He is a part of the wall. He feeds on the blood with his hands, stumbles and falls and soaks up the mucous through his clothes. It sticks to his skin when he tries to peel his shirt away from his body. It smears his arms with rust-brown, blackens his fingers and sinks through the vessels in his skin, corrupting him. It has always been so. Why was he so afraid? This is his prison, and his destiny.

There are words echoing above him that he can barely understand, barely hear above the sonorous, subterranean echo of the Call. _Hold his head up_. He jerks his chin spastically, neck twitching. His eyes roll back in his head and a guttural question forms on his lips, but his tongue is leaden and immobile.

A taste blooms on his tongue, familiar and yet not. It is poison, and it is life—bitter and foul like the slick that runs between his lips and over his chin, but laced with something bright, something heavy and sweet like mead, or dark red wine. What is wine? A vague memory forms, a pellet of light balled deep in the back of his head: a stolen sip from a decanter, shared between two giggling boys. A sunlit garden, and hiding in the bushes. A gentle scolding. _I won’t tell your father if you won’t._

Felix staggers against the wall, mouth agape in a soundless scream. Felix. His name is Felix.

He grasps at nothing. His fingers sink into the fleshy wall, push deep into the fragile heat, and pull apart the skin. Red and black pour out at his feet—wine and blood. He shoves again, deeper, forearms fighting against the muscular resistance of the wall, then his elbows. He is face-to-face with it, and the smell is thick in his mouth. His teeth are bared. He spits, and the black between his teeth lands against the quivering pink and hisses like acid, burning smoke singeing the hairs in his nostrils.

The prison cracks apart. He opens his eyes. The world is pale and colorless, dry and cold but for a blaze of sky-blue, set like gemstones in a pale face.

Felix screams.

 _Alive_.

///

Carver skulks around the infirmary all the next day without actually setting foot inside. He’s not sure why—he tells himself he doesn’t want to intrude, but that Pavus fellow has finally torn himself away from his friend’s bedside and the excuse falls flat.

He hasn’t laid eyes on their newest Warden since the day before, when he held the dying man’s mouth ajar for the Joining. Truth be told, he’s a little afraid to see the outcome for himself. He knows what happens when someone is exposed to the Blight sickness for too long. The raving madness, the gibbering, gnawing at their own flesh in a desperate hunger that cannot be sated. Ghouls, Stroud calls them, trapped somewhere between man and darkspawn. Felix had been on the verge of that horror when they finally reached him, dark skin bleached ashen and unseeing eyes bruised blank and hollow—surely there can be no recovery from that, even with the blood of Wardens staving off madness. In spite of all his forced cheer, Pavus seemed shaken when he left the infirmary a little while ago, and Carver knows that what he saw in his friend’s face was far from what he hoped for.

The infirmary door swings open, breaking into his morbid thoughts, and his sister steps out. She sees him almost immediately and redirects her course, swinging around to greet him. “Hey, Carv. Didn’t think I’d see you around here.”

“Why not?” he asks bluntly, scuffing the grass with his boot.

Marian eyes him, always so bloody knowing, like she can see past his layers to the little boy inside even after all this time. It’s as unnerving as it ever was. “You don’t like Joinings. Well, you don’t like the _Wardens_ , I suppose I should say. Seems odd that you’re so keen on this one.”

“I’m not— _keen_.” It’s always so hard to talk around her. His words seem to trip on his tongue and stick there under her cool blue gaze. She has an odd trick of making him feel useless just be being near, but Maker take him, he loves her dearly. “He’s just been dragged back from death’s doorstep. It’s… normal to be concerned. Um. Thoughtful.” His eyes narrow. “Why are _you_ visiting him, anyway?”

“I’m delivering Curly a full report since he can’t set foot outside his office without being swarmed,” she says, forcefully bright. “Damned useful trick, taking all the attention off of me.”

“Yes, all that _attention_ must be such a trial.”

“It is, actually.” Her face is paler than he remembers, a little more drawn. She’s tired. She’s no Warden, not susceptible to the Calling that tangles in his nightmares night after night, but she looks as if she sleeps as poorly as he. “You should go. Talk to him, I mean.”

“To…”

“Felix. The Tevinter? The Warden you just hijacked, with a little help from his friends?”

“I…” Carver is caught wrong-footed. “I didn’t realize. I thought his name was Alexius.”

“That’s his _surname_ , dolt. Try not to use it, either, it reminds him of his father. Stroud made that mistake twice already.” She claps him on the shoulder, and for the first time in his memory, it doesn’t send him reeling. For a mage, her strength has always been as steely as a warrior’s. He nudges her back with his shoulder, gently. He can’t quite bring himself to bash her back.

“Whatever. Go fawn over Knight-Captain wotsit, why don’t you. Don’t remember you liking him this much back in Kirkwall.”

“People change.” She smirks at him. “You should try it.”

“Ha bloody ha.” This time he _does_ bash her, just a little bit, a friendly cuff around the head that she dodges artfully before skipping across the green. “Stuff it!” he shouts after her. A weak comeback, but he’d survived worse indignities.

“You first!” she calls back, and it’s almost like old times, tussling in the fields behind their house on the fringes of Lothering playing at wolf-hunt.

He gathers his courage and opens the door.

For a moment he stands on the threshold, disoriented. The room is long and low-ceilinged, white-washed stucco lighting up the corners and banishing cobwebs from beneath the beds. It’s also significantly emptier than the last time he’d been in: there are only two patients that he can see, and neither of them are the one he’s looking for.

“Hullo.”

Carver turns on his heel, scanning the empty beds. Felix had been in a corner before, almost an alcove, enclosed by a curtain that hid his suffering from the other patients. Now he lays propped up in a bed against the opposite wall, bathed in sunlight and smiling vaguely in Carver’s direction.

He doesn’t look as bad as Carver had imagined, but he won’t be winning any beauty contests any time soon. He’s still pale, cheeks hollow, and the black bruises around his eyes have faded to the purplish-blue of sleeplessness. The dark bulging veins in his throat and cheeks have left their mark as well, little grey lines that stand out harshly against his pockmarked complexion—but in spite of all that, his eyes are dark and direct, alive with keen interest, and the hands that rest on the counterpane are calm and steady in their crisp bandaging, no longer shaking and curled with wretched hunger.

Carver clears his throat. “Er, hi.” He wavers in the door a moment longer, legs leaden. He’s forgotten why he came.

“You’re Carver, right?” His voice is quiet, a little raspy with disuse, and his Trade is flawless with only the slightest hint of Tevene lilting in the vowels. “Carver Hawke?

“How did you know?”

“Your sister was just here, waxing rhapsodic about you. And, you know. The armor sort of gives it away.”  He gives a small, pleased smile at his own joke, and Carver returns it rustily. “You can come in, you know. I don’t run the place, but I suppose I’m the only one fit to play host at the moment.”

Carver steps inside, glancing at the other patients: a gravid elven woman who sleeps fitfully in a bed by the door, and an elderly man with a splinted leg and a snore like a distant druffalo stampede. He sidesteps the man’s cot and perches awkwardly at the edge of a stool that someone has situated at Felix’s bedside. “Not good company?”

Felix shrugs amiably. He’s remarkably poised for a man recently dead—Carver thinks he envies him that, a bit. “Gracie’s nice enough, when she feels like being sociable, but Walter has endless trivial stories about the Orlesian war and I think I’ve heard them all at least twice by now.”

“And you only woke up yesterday.”

“Exactly,” Felix says, and laughs a little. It’s a nice laugh, if a little frayed around the edges—it makes his deep brown eyes shine with life, and Carver can almost ignore the vestiges of illness that cling stubbornly to his features. “You can see why I’m relieved to have company.”

Carver shifts on the stool, feeling a little more at ease. “Why was Marian here?”

“Marian? Oh, Hawke?” He grimaces an apology at Carver’s sour expression. “Sorry. You’re probably sick of hearing that.”

“Believe me, I’m used to it. She’s had a monopoly on the family name for years now.” He rests his chin on one hand. “She was telling you about me, wasn’t she.”

“Sort of. She… knows what it’s like to have to make the decision that Dorian made for me, and she wanted to make sure I was all right.”

“And are you?”

“I’m… I don’t know. I’m not quite sure, yet. I don’t resent him for it—I couldn’t.”

Carver stares at his feet. “It took me years to forgive Marian. I’m not ashamed of that, nor should you be. What happened to you… it’s the sort of choice that should never have to be made, but it was, and now you’re the one who has to live with the consequences.”

“He apologized to me. When I first woke up, he was the only one there, and he’d been crying.” Felix huffs a humorless laugh. “He was always the happy-go-lucky one of the two of us. Gliding through his studies and his apprenticeship like there was nothing holding him back. I’ve never seen him like that before. Completely broken.”

“Sounds like you’ve forgiven him already.”

“Maybe I have.” The weight of Felix’s gaze is heavy on him, even though Carver’s eyes are trained on the floor. “But I don’t think that makes me a better man. I… Maker, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to speak of such dark and gloomy things.”

A shrug. “It comes with the territory.” When Carver looks up at him, Felix meets his eyes with a ready smile. “Especially with Stroud for a commanding officer.”

“Bit of a downer, isn’t he? He met with me just this morning, when he deemed me ‘fit for bearing the burden of understanding.’ Does he always talk like that?”

“Most of the time, I’m afraid. You get used to it.”

“You’ve been traveling with him for a while, then?”

“Only a year or so, but I served under him at Ansburg where he was Warden-Commander.”

“Why wasn’t he stationed in Orlais?”

“I think he has noble blood, or something, and he was sent to the Free Marches to avoid political problems. He’s a good man, and a good leader, but he’s… a bit dour.”

Felix smiles lightly, teasingly. “Is that where you get it from, then, or is it a natural talent?”

“Both,” Carver grunts. He expects to feel offended, as he always does when someone pokes fun at him, but somehow Felix has a way about him that soothes Carver’s irascible pride. “I’m sorry if you were expecting different, but I’m not very much like my sister.” Not like either of them. Bethany, at least, had been able to understand his silences and social ineptitude effortlessly, in spite of her own bubbly nature. It was like having an interpreter always by his side, a bastion between him and the ebb and flux of the real world. He still misses it after all this time—misses _her_.

“I’ve offended you,” Felix says quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“You haven’t. Like I said, I’m used to it. I was only… thinking of someone.” Felix doesn’t ask, but there’s a weight on Carver’s chest, coaxing him to speak his mind. Like there’s a little piece of Bethany living in this kind-eyed, soft-spoken stranger. “My sister—my other sister, that is. My twin, Bethany. She was killed during the Blight.”

Felix bows his head. “I’m sorry. Truly. I won’t pretend to feel the same pain, but I lost my mother to darkspawn in the same attack that infected me.”

“It’s hard,” Carver agrees. He doesn’t speak of his own parents, though he can feel their ghosts leaning over him as if urging him to break his silence. This isn’t a competition for _who has the shittiest family history_. “I’m sorry about your mother. And… your father.”

Felix shrugs awkwardly, movements confined by the embrace of the pillows that prop him up. “I’m trying not to think too hard on it. There is much yet for me to be thankful for.” He sighs. “What you said before—there’s nothing wrong with being serious. I’ve just… had a bit of enough of it. Everything’s being serious for years now, since my mother died and I fell ill, and Dorian having to escape the country. After all that… I’m glad to be alive, for a little while longer. At least now I have the chance to avenge my mother’s death, and perhaps find peace in that.”

“I hope you find it,” Carver says honestly. “I’m not sure if I have, yet.”

Felix smiles again, though it’s a pale ghost of his earlier cheer. “Perhaps we can search for it together, if you’re willing. It’s been a while since I’ve had a friend.”

Carver can’t help the startled “are we friends?” that blurts from his mouth, and he wants to swallow it when Felix’s face falls.

“Well. We seem to have some things in common. You know—tainted blood, sacred duty, dead family. That sort of stuff.”

“I suppose we do.” It’s a grim thought, or it should be, but Carver finds he’s smiling instead. “I would like that.”

“Truly?”

“Wouldn’t have said it otherwise. Incurably serious stick-in-the-mud, remember?”

“You’re too hard on yourself,” Felix chides. “We’ll have to work on that. Come again tomorrow and keep me company? I’m going mad with only the wall to talk to—and that’s on a good day.” He looks around at the war veteran, still snoring lustily. “And maybe… I dunno. Bring me a book or something, if you can spare the time.”

Carver nods once, taking the request as earnestly as an order given in battle. “I’ll see what I can do.”

///

 “All clear!”

Felix falls back, panting, and lets the electricity spell fade back into the lyrium channels in his staff. The air is charged with pent-up static as he limps over to the main group, clustering loosely around the spirit healer as she sets to work.

“Just a few scratches,” he says to her, and crouches at the end of the line with his staff planted firmly in the dust for support. She nods and turns back to her patient, who bites back a grimace as she draws a lucky Venatori arrow from his thigh.

The closer they get to Adamant, the more Venatori outposts they encounter. It’s been a crash-course in battle tactics, and Felix is honestly grateful for the practice. He’s been working as part of a forward group, paired with two other Inquisition mages that keep an eye on his form and give guidance during the flow of battle, but today was different. He was finally deemed fit for solo battlemage duty on a team with two scouts, a spirit healer, and a handful of warriors, Carver Hawke among them. It was terrifying, a bit, but also thrilling, and he relishes the sting of adrenaline as it bleeds through his veins and spirals away in glittering pinpricks of Fade energy.

“You’re good with that staff.”

Felix squints up through the last dregs of sunlight to see Carver looming over him, bloodied greatsword in one hand. “Thanks. Same to you—with the sword, obviously. You have an interesting style of fighting, I don’t think I’ve seen it before.”

Carver shrugs his broad shoulders, leaning against a boulder to strop his blade clean of blood. “I learned a trick or two from Stroud—he trained as a Chevalier before joining the Wardens. It’s not a common discipline outside of Orlais.”

“Well you were obviously a good student.” He grins cheekily. “Should I call you Champion Hawke, then?”

Carver huffs, as good as a laugh with him. “Please don’t. As if I needed any more reason to change my name.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“No, I suppose not. There are enough Hawkes in the world, I can get away with it.”

“You can never have too many Hawkes,” Felix says cheerfully, and grins when Carver snorts and looks away. “What? You’re a decent lot. The ones I know, anyway.”

“You didn’t grow up with Marian for an elder sibling.”

“Fair.”

Carver slides the sword back into its sheath. “D’you have any? Siblings?”

“Nope. Only child. Dorian and I were like brothers, but that’s not much consolation when you’re the only heir.”

“Not inheriting your father’s… lordship, or whatever?”

“His seat in the Magisterium,” Felix corrects. “It’s been taken over by some upstart third-cousin-twice-removed, I think. It’s too bad, really. Dorian and I had such grand plans.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, the usual. Eradicating slavery. Regulating the use of blood magic, and actually punishing those who abuse it. Proper Circles for mages who are born to poor families.”

Carver almost looks impressed, but his face is still hard for Felix to read. “All tall orders.”

“Very. We didn’t like to think small.” Felix shrugs halfheartedly, wincing when the motion pulls on a scorch-mark he suffered from a Venatori mage’s fireball. Carver’s eyes narrow.

“You’re injured.”

“Just a little. I can wait.” He jerks his head to the three or four wounded clustered around the healer. “They’ve got a missing finger and a stomach injury to take care of first.”

“At least let me look at it. I’ve got some healing salve left, if it’s not too bad—we can save Iman the trouble and the mana.”

“All right then.” Felix shrugs out of his halberd and unlaces the chainmail tunic enough to bare his shoulder. He can’t see the damage, but he can feel the iron-red burn down the back of his neck and along the shoulder blade. Carver hisses sympathetically, and then icy coolness is being dabbed on the tender flesh. Felix tries not to flinch.

“Sorry. It’s blistering a bit, but it doesn’t look awful. You can’t conjure some frost or something?”

“Not my best field. I’d probably freeze my arm solid.” As the salve does its work, he finds himself leaning a little into Carver’s touch, surprisingly gentle for a man who throws a massive claymore around on a regular basis. “So, chevalier, healer… do you have any other hidden talents?”

Carver grunts. “My smart mouth, or so I’m told.”

“Ha! That is certainly true. I think you could match Dorian on the floor of the magisterium, if you really put your mind to it.” At Carver’s startled glance, he winks. “You’re smarter than you look, ser brutus.”

“Mmf. Is that an insult?”

“A compliment, actually, of your strength. Do you not speak anything but Trade?”

“Afraid not. Not such a smart mouth after all.” He drops his hands, and Felix feels the loss keenly. “I’ve been training in other forms, actually—it helps me focus my mind away from the Calling. I’d recommend it, but you’re not warrior, so I’m not sure how much help it would be.”

“Forms such as?”

“Well, the _chevalier_ style, for starters, but it’s a little too… fanciful for my tastes.” With his simple healing task complete, Carver plops himself down on the rock beside Felix, squinting up through the scrubby foliage at the sere blue sky overhead. “I wanted to learn some of the reaver discipline, but that’s harder to study on your own.”

“I thought that was a form of blood magic?” Felix breaks in, surprised. “Southerners don’t usually go in for that sort of thing.”

“True. Thus why I’ve had such a hard time finding a trainer. I’ve pestered the Iron Bull a bit—you’ve met him? Big gray qunari merc, one eye?—but even he’s not a ‘true’ reaver. He’s not undergone the blood ritual. Says it gives him the heebie-jeebies.” Carver smiles thinly. “It’s a bit of a morally gray area, I grant you, but Wardens have done worse for their cause over the centuries.”

Felix hardly dares to hope, but… “Is blood magic permitted in the Wardens?”

“The Joining is a blood ritual in itself,” Carver replies, spreading his hands. “I know you weren’t exactly conscious for it, but Stroud explained it to you after, yeah? So. We can’t exactly point fingers at maleficar when the whole reason we are what we are centers on a form of blood magic.”

“But what do _you_ think about it?” Felix presses.

Carver eyes him. “Why d’you want to know?”

Felix can’t help but laugh, a little bitterly—the sound draws eyes, and he keeps his voice low as he says, “Are you really asking me that question? Me, the mage from _Tevinter_?”

“Not all Tevinter mages practice blood magic,” Carver says evenly. “Pavus doesn’t. I’m not asking—I don’t want to know. But the Wardens are a little freer in most respects than your average Southerner, so. Make of that what you will.”

Felix is a little disappointed when Carver changes the subject to something else, but he makes himself relax into the conversation. Carver is surprisingly easy to talk to. Beneath his taciturn shell, Carver has a dry, sometimes macabre sense of humor, and can be surprisingly cheerful when Felix catches him at the right time and in the right mood. He hopes the unspoken druffalo in the room won’t deteriorate the fragile friendship they’ve managed to cultivate in the past week.

He’s never had an opinion one way or another about blood magic. It’s power just like any other, and can be misused and abused just as creationism can, or entropy, or even spirit healing, come to that. His father insisted he incorporate it into his studies—for, as Gereon warned, any magister worth his salt would be able to wield it, and one cannot conquer the force one does not understand.

He doesn’t use it often. His life up until now has been fairly sedate, all things considered: studying hard in the Circle to earn his father’s approval, apprenticing under a few different magisters to learn a variety of schools, pursuing the discipline of knight-enchanter as a way to keep his body honed and in tune with his mental focus. But all of it has taken place within the safe luxury of his social position. Now a Warden, living day by day and always battling the taint that whispers its crippling Call in the back of his mind, he knows it will only be a matter of time. He can only hope that when that time comes, Carver will be able to forgive him.

///

Carver is alone in the tent he shares with Felix when Stroud appears at the open flap, looking even more dour and grim-faced than usual. He puts aside his sword, which he’s been oiling conscientiously in preparation for tomorrow’s battle, and stands to bid him entry.

“I must speak with you, Warden Hawke,” and oh, that’s not good. Stroud calls him Hawke, most days, or Ser Carver in front of polite company. Warden Hawke is saved for truly dire moments. “It regards the battle to come.”

“I’m ready, ser,” Carver says immediately.

“Are you?”

“I am confident in my abilities, ser. And if they prove lacking, then may my final sacrifice commend my soul to the Maker with honor.”

Stroud cocks his head, and there’s a faint smile hiding somewhere beneath that mustache. “Do you even believe in the Maker, Hawke?”

“Every man believes in the Maker on the eve of battle, ser.”

“Perhaps that is so. In any case, it’s not the battle itself that concerns me. It’s the outcome. We face a terrible foe, Hawke, as you well know, and if needs must I am ready to give up my life and my shield to the Inquisitor’s cause.”

“As must we all be,” Carver says hesitantly.

Stroud seems caught between approval and its opposite. He sighs rather than contradict him, though, and folds his hands behind his back. “We must prepare for any eventuality. If I do not survive Adamant, Warden Hawke, you must take up the quest I have set for myself. We may not find the answers we seek within that fortress, and what remains, therefore, is to seek them elsewhere.”

“Weisshaupt.” The word leaps to his lips unbidden, and Carver bites his lower lip belatedly. “Ser?”

Stroud’s iron façade softs with approval. “Just so. Warden-Commander Tabris was headed there, last I heard from her. We need to make contact with her as soon as we fulfill our obligation to the Inquisitor—it’s likely she has answers to our questions about Corypheus and his manipulation of the Calling. If the worst should happen and I do not survive what is to come, that task falls to you and to Warden Felix.”

“Understood, ser. But what if none of us make it?”

“Someone must. Hawke, _you_ must. Whatever it takes.”

“And Felix?”

Stroud’s face is stone. “Warden Alexius is neither tried nor tested. If you must make the choice between yourself or him, you know what you have to do.”

“But ser—”

“Hawke.” His voice cracks like a whip. “Wardens must sometimes make sacrifices for the greater good. You know this. If you do not think you can make that sacrifice, tell me now, and I will inform Commander Cullen that you are to remain behind with the siege engines.”

Carver flinches imperceptibly. “Understood, ser. I will do what must be done.”

“Good man.” Stroud nods and leaves again, and the flap drops behind him with a slap of finality. Carver scowls at it.

“With respect, ser, fuck you.”

But there’s no one to hear him.

///

Felix loses track of Carver early on. Stroud had instructed them very specifically to _stay together_ —they’re dressed in their Warden blues, and although they’ve been given special tabards emblazoned with the eye of the Inquisition, the melee of battle makes it difficult to distinguish them from the Wardens who fight against them. Felix spends most of the time dodging arrows and replenishing his barrier, ducking through shadows and up staircases as he tries to find a vantage point from which to survey the battle.

He’s fought his way through two rage demons and a veritable army of aimless, chill-boned wraiths when he finds himself up on the ramparts in the middle of a lull. The Inquisitor and his companions are nowhere to be seen, and the few Wardens he spies are fighting against demons rather than with them. That’s heartening.

A bellow of rage catches his ear and he turns, staff lifted instinctively. His heart stops. Separate from the rest of the fighting, Carver Hawke is braced against the battlements, facing off against a pride demon. _Alone._ Felix has never seen one up close—though this distance can hardly be called close—and it’s breathtaking in the worst way. Carver isn’t small by any means, tall as well as broad, with massive shoulders and powerful thighs that propel him through battle with surprising speed, but against the bulk of the pride demon he looks positively waifish.

They’ve been going at it for a while. Felix can see the way Carver’s strikes are a little slow, his footwork dragging just a bit against the blood-slicked granite. The demon, too, is sluggish—it moves as if through treacle, its barriers worn down time and again, and the wicked edge of Carver’s sword has left Fade-green rents in its scaly hide. But its crackling lightning-whip is still frighteningly accurate, lashing out across the distances Carver puts between them, and he has no shield to protect himself.

Felix summons a barrier and casts it beneath Carver’s feet. It wavers a little more than he would like. Raw spirit magic has always escaped him, and defensive spells come reluctantly, even with the warding glyphs inscribed into his staff for extra protection. He longs to draw the ceremonial knife he wears on a chain around his neck, tucked safely beneath his tabard, and spill a little blood to quicken Carver’s steps and shield him with a wall of leeching power, but he dares not. Not out in the open, and not with the Veil so thin, demons walking rampant and eager to sink their ravenous claws into the slightest hint of weakness. Instead he builds a bolt inside himself, drawing the mana through his staff until the focus crystal blazes purple-white. Drawn by the light, the pride demon turns its head his way, and Felix uses that split-second of distraction to throw a massive bolt of energy directly into its chest.

The demon roars and staggers back, shuddering, but the bolt is absorbed through its cat-o-nine-tails and does little lasting damage. Felix curses and summons ice a little clumsily, frosting the creature’s left side in time for Carver to come down with a terrific _slam_. The demon’s frozen arm shatters and its screams its rage to the sky.

In a single moment, Felix’s triumphant shout is lost. The demon turns, its single-minded focus bent toward Carver, and lashes out with its remaining arm. Carver jumps back, but not quickly enough—the jagged horns protruding from its elbow catch him in the stomach and he goes flying through the air. Felix shouts again, this time with fear, as Carver slams into the parapet and slumps bonelessly to the ground.

“Carver!” he screams, and once more the demon turns his way. But this time he’s prepared. He passes his staff to his off-hand and conjures a spirit blade with his left, a massive longsword that he would scarcely be able to grip were it not composed entirely of Fade energy. He is faster than the pride demon, slowed as it is, and he sprints across the open ground and under its guard before it can lift its whip against him. He slams the butt-end of his staff on the flagstones, drawing a sizzling glyph of static that jolts the demon back apace, and with all the fury in his bones he brings the spirit blade around and up to sink deeply into the demon’s chest.

It parts the tough gray skin with ease, slicing through flesh and bone, and Felix pushes through until his hand butts up against the demon’s body. It shrieks, staggers, and Felix yanks the blade free with a sharp twist. Black blood spurts out in its wake and coats his chest and arm, but he dares not pause—letting his staff fall, he takes the sword in both hands and brings it across with a mighty bellow. The demon’s head rolls free of its body easily, and the wet thud of it hitting the ground is darkly satisfying.

Felix leaves the smoldering corpse without a backward glance, pausing only to dispel the blade and snatch up his staff. The focus crystal shattered when he dropped it, and it smokes slightly as he runs across the slick stone to where Carver lies unmoving.

“Carver! Oh fuck, Carver, open your eyes!” He throws himself down, knees bruising, but he doesn’t even notice the pain. He fumbles with the bloodied buckles of Carver’s breastplate and lifts it away. The demon has punched right through tabard and chainmail as if it wasn’t even there, and Carver’s left side gapes open to the night air, bleeding freely. Felix chokes and presses his hands against the wound. “Carver, _wake up_!”

Somehow, miraculously, he does. Bright blue eyes flutter open, glittering like sapphires in his bloodless face, and his mouth opens in a wet gasp. “Felix?”

“Oh thank fuck.” Felix pulls at Carver’s deadweight arms, pushing his hands practically into his own body in an effort to stop the bleeding. “You blighted idiot, what were you thinking? You know better than to get that close.”

Carver smiles, and his teeth are red with his own blood. “It was gonna come for you. Couldn’t… let that happen.”

“I could have held it off a moment longer.” He hardly hears himself, too busy looking around wildly for someone—anyone—to come help them. But this corner of the ramparts is deserted, and they are alone. “Just because I kept it from splitting you open for two seconds doesn’t mean you needed to throw yourself into the gauntlet _again_.”

“You… saved me. I needed t’repay the debt.”

How is he even speaking? Felix grits his teeth and pushes _harder_ , blots out the sight of blood leaving Carver’s body and replaces it with a vision of the man in his mind, hale and whole and speckled with sunlight. “There is no debt, fool man. You helped save me once before. I was only returning the favor.”

“The Joining is no salvation.” Blood stains his lips, wine-red, but there is no trace of pain in Carver’s face. “Believe me. I would have spared you if I could.”

“Shut up,” Felix hisses. “Stop talking. Talking is bad, right? Just… hold on to that.” He pushes Carver’s hands harder against his own belly, trying to stem the wound. “Help is coming.”

“Fee…” Carver’s voice trails off before he can form the other syllable, and it’s so painfully like a nickname that it drives a sharp knife of grief into Felix’s belly. “Listen. You need… to get to Weisshaupt. The Hero… of Ferelden is there. She will have answers. She will need you. Fee, d’you understand?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Felix snarls, blinking back the clouds in his eyes. “Bloody stubborn Fereldans, how many times do I have to tell you to _stop talking_.” He fumbles with his gauntlet, but it’s slippery with blood, and it takes three tries to wrest it from his arm. The bruise-purple threads of his veins stand darkly against the ashy pallor of his wrist, still not returned to the rich tan he’d once boasted in his life before this one. The knife he wears around his neck is impossible to reach, so he bends awkwardly and lets the skin part around the keen edge of Carver’s blade.

“What’re you doing?” Carver slurs.

“Praying you won’t remember this.”

It’s been a long time, but he knows this spell like the back of his hand—the same one his father drilled into him again and again, every night like clockwork when the taint began to take hold in his body. He finds the flesh in Carver’s body, gone putrid with the poison in the demon’s claws, and with the fervent power in his blood, he draws it out like squeezing water from fresh cheese. Carver’s heart stutters and slows, an echo in Felix’s skull, and he reaches out with another thread of power and wraps it up tight. Felix feels the answering pain in his own chest, but he wrenches the link tight and Carver’s heart lurches into time with Felix’s, safe and steady.

He’s still holding him there between the edges of living and dying when they are found. Felix is waxy and shaking, blood in his mouth, and all he can hear is the beat of his heart in his ears, so loud he didn’t even realize when the Calling suddenly went quiet.

///

He wakes up in a narrow cot some time later, aching down to his bones. He’s in the field hospital, he realizes, and it’s full to bursting. Surgeons and spirit healers bustle between the rows of patients, administering salves or potions, and under the low murmur of their work, the moans of the injured and the dying sigh like ghosts. A few cots over, someone’s leg is being amputated—they scream around the leather thrust between their teeth, and Felix looks away, stomach twisting.

And there is Carver. He lays awake in the cot beside him, bare chest bandaged with clean linen and the thin wool blanket pulled up to his waist. The sight of him strikes hard at Felix like a kick to the chest—although perhaps that’s just the aftereffects of the heartbeat spell—and he lets himself just look for a moment. Whatever pain he suffers now, whatever penalty he might receive for performing blood magic on a fellow Warden under the sanction of the Inquisition, it will have been worth it. Felix clears the rasp from his throat and says, “Hey.”

Carver doesn't so much as flinch. His jaw, Felix realizes, is tighter than a drum, the tendons in his cheek standing out and his lips pressed into a thin white line.

“Carver? Are you in pain?” He struggles upright, hissing involuntarily as his chest throbs, and finally Carver looks over at him, anger written under the stony façade of his face.

“Stop it. I’m fine, or I will be. You shouldn’t be sitting up.”

Felix lowers himself back down slowly. His chest still twinges, but he resists the urge to rub it. “You’re upset with me.”

“Maker fuck! Yes I’m blood upset with you!” The outburst draws a few stares their way, but no one hushes him. Felix realizes there are a good three empty cots between him and the next patient over. _No one wants to sleep beside a maleficar_. Except Carver, apparently, but he might not have had much choice.

“I thought I’d made it clear I practice blood magic,” Felix says lowly. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask your permission first, but you weren’t exactly in a good place to be giving consent.”

“Consent? Andraste’s bleeding quim, Felix, you almost _died_. Yeah, I’m a little upset that you used blood magic on me instead of, I don’t know, tracking down a spirit healer or something—I had another half-hour in me at least before I bled out, but I get it, I do. The heat of battle and whatever. You panicked.” He grits his teeth and forces the next words out between them. “And _you_ almost paid the price.”

Felix blinks rapidly, trying to follow the tangled web of expletives and anger. “Wait. You’re saying you’re upset with me for putting _myself_ in danger?”

“Yes! Fucking Void! That’s exactly what I’m saying.” At least he’s managing to keep his voice down, for now. He grits his teeth, obviously in pain as he rolls over and heaves himself upright to sit facing Felix. He braces one hand against his side, where a scant handful of hours ago he’d been torn open and bleeding his insides all over Felix’s hands. Felix can’t look at him.

“I’d do it again if I had to.”

“ _Why_? You’ve known me all of… what, two weeks? Were you even thinking of your own skin?”

“What does it matter? _You_ had to live. Stroud made that perfectly clear.”

He can hear Carver going suddenly still. “What,” he says, voice thin and empty.

“I overheard, when he came to our tent. I was about to come in and I heard you talking.” He finally turns his head on the pillow and looks at him. Carver’s blue eyes bore into him like chips of ice, unblinking. “And he was right. I… your defense of me was admirable, but he was right. I’m the expendable one of the two of us. You needed to be kept alive, so I did what needed to be done.”

Carver stares at him a little while longer, then looks away, shaking his head. “You’re better at this bloody Warden business than I am.”

“What d’you mean?”

“You must have heard what Stroud said, about making the hard decisions. You were willing. I was not.”

“Perhaps a balance can be found,” Felix says. He lets himself rub his chest, probing at the phantom pains that sink their claws into his sternum. It will fade with time, he knows, but he can’t help the slight swell of panic at the sluggish beat of his heart, just a pace or two behind the usual. Carver reaches out and grabs his hand, preventing him.

“Stop that. Try and sleep, won’t you? We have quite a journey ahead of us.”

Felix looks at him, startled. “We? You mean I’m coming with you?”

“Of course you’re bloody coming with me. I need someone to watch my back—it’s a long way to Weisshaupt.”

“But what about…” He gestures vaguely with his right hand, his off-hand, the one he uses for drawing blood. He’s always overcautious about proper healing, but recent use has left a livid red scar down the length of his forearm, illustrating perfectly his reason for concern.

Carver shakes his head. “Even if we _weren’t_ outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, being the only two Wardens who didn’t go completely batshit with the false Calling, they’re too busy figuring out what to do with the Orlesian Wardens to worry about one measly little maleficar. Besides,” and his smile is forced, lopsided, but still sincere, “you’re not really a blood mage, not the way Southerners see blood mages. You’re a mage who occasionally practices blood magic in times of extreme duress. There’s a difference.”

“That’s… surprisingly progressive of you.” Felix glances around, but there’s no one close enough to overhear. “I don’t even think Dorian could admit that much.”

“Does he know?”

“About my, ah, occasional dabbling into dark magics?” Felix grins humorlessly. “No, and I’d prefer to keep it that way. He may be a necromancer, but he has no patience whatsoever for blood magic. Not that I blame him, after what he went through.”

Carver nods once. “I don’t—I’m not saying I’m comfortable with it, because I’m not. But I have to be practical. You _did_ just save my life, after all, and I’m sure you’ll have cause to use similar methods in the future. Just…”

“I’ll always ask first, unless we’re under extreme duress,” Felix promises. “And never on you, not without your explicit permission.”

“That’s fair.” Carver sighs, then grimaces, lowering himself back down to the cot with agonizing slowness. “And before I forget—thank you. Truly. Just… try not to do it again, with the,” he waves his hand about, “the whole risking-your-life-for-mine thing.”

“Hmph.” Felix looks away to hide his budding smile. “No promises.”


	2. the shadows where we stand vigilant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for non-graphic torture, and self-harm for blood magic purposes.

The Blight has come to the Anderfels. Carver can feel it even before they reach the outer edges, but Felix is a little less attuned to it, and it shows—he shies away as the path begins to crack and weep, and goes as still as a startled deer, gazing with wide eyes into the decaying forest all around them.

“Be grateful this isn’t the Deep Roads,” is all Carver says, and trudges on. Eventually, Felix follows.

They feel Weisshaupt fortress before they see it. Carved directly into the bone-white limestone bluffs, it’s always just beyond the edge of sight, but it pulses in Carver’s mind with the ugly black rot of the taint. He planned to find the Hero of Ferelden by feel, sifting through the remnants of the false Calling to the pure silver strand of her presence in the region, but all hopes of that are dashed when he realizes the truth: the ancient holdfast of the Grey Wardens has been overrun by darkspawn.

It was once a beautiful scene, he’s sure. In the lee of a fallen log at the precipice of a horrific drop, he stands abreast of Felix and stares over the yawning valley to where Weisshaupt sits, a great glowering cliff-face stained black. The white shows through, still, but the pristinely-carved buttresses and parapets are mismatched at best, choked with blast-holes and oozing with the foul excretion of the taint. It’s awe-inspiring, and yet Carver feels only dread at the thought of breaching that poisoned wall. But there is no other option but to press on, so they do. They camp at the fringes of the blight, taking turns keeping watch, and the next day is cold and wet and awful as they navigate the treacherous slopes. The roads are barren and lonely, infected with taint, and Carver dares not risk open travel, clinging instead of the scrubby cover of the undergrowth. Still, he can’t help but feel eyes on the back of his neck as the hours stretch on, and he knows they’re being hunted.

Towards evening, they are picking their way through the fringes of a scrubby wood toward the bottom of the valley when a warning burns in Carver’s mind. He grabs the edge of Felix’s cloak and yanks him back just as a hurlock bursts from an explosion of smoke and buries two jagged blades in the dirt where Felix had been standing.

The mage gives a cry of surprise but recovers quickly—lightning springs from his fingers, a little disjointed with no staff to channel the mana, and the hurlock shudders and jerks in a paroxysm that gives Carver enough time to draw his sword. He springs into the air and comes down like a gavel on the judge’s podium, and the darkspawn splits from skull to stomach, meat and viscera flinging outward from the force of the strike.

Felix has already drawn up a barrier around them both, and the next scout that flurries forward out of the shadows meets it with a shriek and the smell of singed flesh. Before Carver can act, a shimmering blue blade appears in Felix’s hand, and he lunges forward to spear the hurlock in the gut. Carver takes of its head for good measure and stands panting, waiting for the next assault.

None comes. His mind is quiet. Breathing hard, he wipes his blade and sheaths it as the spirit barrier fizzles out, little blue tracery falling from his clothes like talcum. “Nice work.”

Felix just nods, a little pale under his slowly-returning tan. “I felt them, a split-second before they appeared. _How_ did they sneak up on us?”

“I should have been paying better attention. I’m the senior Warden.” Carver scowls and toes one of the bodies with his boot. “They likely sensed us, the taint in our blood, and knew that it was different.”

“The sensitivity goes both ways, then.”

“Unfortunately.” Carver tips his head back, scanning the area, but nothing feels close. “We won’t be able to get much closer, I don’t think, not without tipping them off.”

“There may be a way to conceal our approach from them,” Felix says hesitantly, and the shift of his eyes and the curl of his hands tells Carver everything he needs to know.

“Blood magic?”

“I… yes.”

Carver stands on the edge of the wasteland, the mountains slopes scraped bare of trees and the gorges poisoned black, and sighs. “Very well. Do what you must.”

“What? Really?”

“It’s not the first time someone I cared about has turned to blood magic for a necessary cause.”

“Not a _good_ cause?” Felix asks, face open with curiosity.

“I can’t bring myself to call it that. But it _is_ necessary.”

“If I’m not the first, then who was?”

Carver feels his jaw harden at the memory—hearing that voice, almost lost to him, speaking the words of binding in a ritual he could hardly comprehend. “My father. It’s… a bit of a long story, and I don’t have time to tell it here. Suffice to say that while I _do_ have my own opinions on the matter, I won’t risk our lives because of them.”

Felix doesn’t appear satisfied, but he hunkers down anyway and draws a thin, jewel-handled blade from a cord around his neck. Carver forces himself to watch. _Just another form of magic. He’s not about to turn into an abomination and kill you_. The insistent mantra doesn’t really help. Felix pushes the keen edge against the wrist, staying safely away from the artery, and red blood wells readily to the surface as if it’s been waiting for its chance. Carver winces and looks away.

It takes a little while. Felix sits in the dirt with his head bowed, eyes closed and fingers dancing in an eerie pattern as he chants under his breath. Carver’s skin prickles but he keeps careful watch on the barren hills, and when the sun begins to sink beyond them, painting long shadows like spilled ink across the valley,  Felix goes loose and lets out a shuddering sigh. “It’s done.”

Carver glances at him. He’s ashen in the evening light, and the dirt beside him is wet and muddy with spilled blood. Felix runs a finger up the length of the cut and the skin knits itself back together in its wake.

“You okay?”

“I’ll be fine. Let’s press on.”

Carver catches his weight as he struggles upright and coaxes him back down. “Let’s not. You need to rest, we can’t have you collapsing in the middle of an attack.”

Felix grunts. “Fine. But I’m not happy about it—we’re sitting ducks out here.”

“Objection noted,” Carver says gruffly, bundling him into a shallow hollow between a rock and a small slide of scree that peels away down the mountainside. It’s protected from the wind, and from unfriendly eyes, but Felix holds himself stiff as a board, eyes tired and hollow. Carver tugs him close against his side and squeezes the nape of his neck in a brotherly grip. “Try to relax. I won’t let anything sneak up on us.”

“It’s bloody relentless,” Felix whispers miserably. “I can hear them scrabbling around, like… ugh… like claws digging into my skull. How can you stand it?”

“Practice. Be thankful you barely heard the false Calling.”

“I am,” says Felix, fervor coloring his voice. “Was it terrible?”

“It was… well. I had Stroud to keep me… sort of sane. And I trained rigorously to keep my mind off it.” Felix settles his head more firmly on Carver’s shoulder as he speaks, and it’s unexpected, but not unwelcome. Carver clears his throat. “Normally you only hear the darkspawn when you’re actively hunting them, which isn’t as often as you’d think. Without a Blight, things are pretty quiet. Bursts of activity in between long stretches of waiting. This is sort of a special case—Stroud and I didn’t expect Weisshaupt to be infected.”

Felix shudders and burrows deeper in the cowl of his cloak, leaning against Carver’s solid weight. “Let’s hope we find the Warden-Commander soon. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

“Agreed,” is his terse reply, and then they are quiet for a while.

* * *

Against all expectations, Felix dozes off on Carver’s shoulder. He sleeps shallowly, toeing the edges of unpleasant dreams without ever straying deeper into their swollen depths, and he jerks awake some time later to Carver’s hand on his thigh and his shadowy profile silhouetted watchfully against the pale stone of the mountainside. Night has fallen cold over the Anderfels, and he shivers slightly as he pricks his ears for whatever Carver seeks.

“We’re being watched, I think,” Carver whispers when he sees that Felix is awake.

“Darkspawn?” Felix asks, every muscle going rigid, but Carver shakes his head.

“Don’t think so. I don’t sense the taint. But a little rock tumbled down a minute ago, and I haven’t heard a thing since. Might just be an animal, but I think whatever dwells in Weisshaupt has cleared out all the wildlife.”

Felix wiggles his fingers. “Want me to check?”

“How’s your mana?”

He’s surprised for a moment before remembering that Carver grew up in a family of mages and likely knows almost as much about magic—in theory, if not in practice—as Felix himself. “Fine. Much better. Or I could use _your_ blood, if you’re worried.”

“Don’t ask me that,” Carver growls. His fist clenches on Felix’s knee and then relaxes again immediately. “Sorry. I just… not unless it’s really necessary, yeah?”

“Of course.” He draws his knife, making as few movements as possible, and cuts a little nick into the soft flesh of his thumb. In the dark, the blood beads black and slides down into the cup of his palm in a tiny trickle. The spell oozes out of him in a similar fashion, sending out little fingers of awareness into the stone and gravel where they have made their nest. And there, perched above the rock in whose lee they rest, a warm, beating heart, steady as a metronome.

“Good instincts,” he breathes. “They’re calm, whoever they are. I don’t think they mean us immediate harm.”

“You can tell that?”

“I can make an educated guess. I _could_ look into their mind, if you wanted, but it would be… difficult.” And use far more blood than he wanted to, just now. “I try to avoid such spells, anyway,” he adds. “The mind-reading ones. Down that path lies more temptation than I care to play with.” He doesn’t know why he feels the need to justify this. He never has before.

“I trust your judgment,” Carver says simply. It’s enough.

Felix seals the wound seamlessly and wipes the blood off onto his trouser leg. “Shall we see what our little spy wants?”

“I… wait a moment.” Carver’s face turns inward, as if he’s looking into a very far distance within himself, and Felix knows he’s listening to the horde. “Darkspawn. I don’t know how many—they’re all muddled, fuck—”

“The spell,” Felix curses. “It’s going both ways.”

“No time to worry about it. We should go before we’re seen, or attack now while we have the element of surprise.”

Felix can feel them too, now, distinct from the low scratching murmur of the darkspawn that have infected Weisshaupt. He grips his staff and lets the power build, flowing readily into the lyrium laced through its core, awaiting his command. Awaiting Carver’s command. “At your word, Warden-Lieutenant.”

Carver doesn’t even bat an eye at the honorific. “You feel them? Good. I need a barrier on me and a lightning storm on them. Keep it up as long as you can, then follow me.”

“Yes, ser.” He’s still not used to following orders in battle, but he doesn’t mind it. He trusts Carver implicitly, and giving himself over to his commands is oddly freeing. He is nothing more than a weapon in Carver’s hands, and it feels good. _Right_.

He draws on the channel of his spirit blade, keeping it veiled, using it as a conduit directly to the Fade to draw a glyph of protection around Carver. It’s a new method he’s been experimenting with, and it comes to him more readily than the traditional spirit barriers. He watches Carver shudder as the magic falls over him like spidersilk, and lifts his hands to summon an electrical storm.

The darkspawn walk straight into the blast and immediately panic. Felix crouches behind a rock, keeping one eye around the edge, and pours his mana into layer upon layer of lightning strikes—chips of ice rain hard against helmets and armor, and a bilious gray fog rolls across the ground, obscuring the chaos within. Two darkspawn stumble into clear air suddenly, and Carver is there with his greatsword, swinging it with almost insulting slowness. Dazed from the unexpected attack, they pose no threat, and crumple to the ground with gouts of black blood spilling from their torn bodies. 

As the storm begins to die, those who survived it are more prepared. A massive genlock, as broad as it is tall and clad in bone-white armor, bursts from the crater of Felix’s tempest with a double-edged axe held high. Carver engages it, staying well away from the last few spats of lightning and ice, leaving Felix room to blast a few more darkspawn with powerful bolts of electricity. With a bellow, Carver puts his sword through the genlock’s head and it goes down with a scream that chills Felix all the way to the bone.

There is a lull, then, and Felix is about to stand and cry victory when a black arrow sings past his cheek. He ducks, bruising his knuckles on the rock, and hears Carver give a cry of pain. He growls and stabs the ground with his staff. The purple glyph sizzles into the dark earth and Felix directs his mana into it, pulling forth a burst of electricity that explodes outward in arcing paths of light. Somewhere, his target shrieks in pain. He drags one more barrier around Carver and a weaker one for himself, and scrambles over the rock for a better view of the battlefield.

Carver is battling a hurlock rogue, its twin blades flashing in the dying sunlight. Two more circle him, but they are weaponless and clearly fear the reach of his claymore. Beyond his shoulder, hidden in the burnt-black scrub, another darkspawn lurks, and Felix can see the flash of an arrowhead trained on Carver. One feathered shaft already protrudes from his leg just above the edge of his greave, not fatal but most certainly painful. Without hesitating, Felix spins his staff over his head and uses the momentum to fling a bolt of energy into the hurlock archer. It staggers, wounded, and the arrow goes flying, this time toward Felix.

Felix jumps out of the way just in time, but his heels trip him up and he goes down. Pain explodes in his elbow as he smacks the ground; from the corner of his eye he can see the two darkspawn swivel their gory heads in his direction. His staff nearly slides from his grip but he clings to it and brings it up with all his strength.

The darkspawn lands on his chest and all his air is forced from his lungs in a gust. It screams in his face, and its spittle flecks his skin like droplets of acid, its Void-white eyes rolling in their socks. Felix struggles against its weight for a moment, panicked, and then a sudden burst of uncontrolled force explodes from him, and the darkspawn goes flying.

He rolls over and gags a little, trying to catch his breath. The threads of his barrier on Carver are dying, and after being stomped in the ribs by a full-sized darkspawn, he’s having trouble getting his mana to respond quickly enough to restore it. He drags himself to his feet with his staff, trying to center himself, and there—a flash of black cloth, twin flashes of silver, and there’s another body on the battlefield. Swift where the darkspawn lumber, hidden when they scream, and wickedly sharp into the back of the alpha Carver has been wearing down. Carver throws himself back as it topples, dead, and turns to face the final genlock.

There is no need. The last darkspawn falls with a gurgle, a stiletto buried in its throat. In the split second between tension and release, Felix takes a breath and finds it cut short as the stiletto’s mate presses beneath his chin. He freezes at the ice-cold tickle of the point against his throat. He can smell magebane, and it turns his belly to water.

“Drop your weapon.” The voice is thickly Antivan, but the man it belongs to is shrouded in a dark cowl, his face concealed behind a thin black mask stylized after a crow’s skull. Felix let his staff fall to the ground with a clatter.

“Carver…”

“I’m here.” Carver is positioned behind the assassin, but edges around so that he stands in both their sights. Felix watches the dark glitter of the assassin’s eyes behind his mask as Carver bends slowly, placing his sword on the bloody earth with a great deal more care than Felix had shown with his own weapon. “We are disarmed, serrah, and mean you no harm. If you could put your blade away I’d be much obliged.”

“You are dressed as Wardens,” the man says, ignoring Carver’s request. “How is it you have not gone stark raving mad so close to Weisshaupt Fortress? Or is this…” his free hand, gloved in black, flicks the edge of Felix’s pauldron, “mere disguise?”

“We are Wardens—” Felix starts, but the blade twitches against his skin and his mouth snaps shut.

“Please,” Carver says calmly, “be at ease.”

“You will not speak,” the assassin bites out. The direction of his gaze is hard to pinpoint, but Felix has no doubt he speaks to him and not to Carver. “I know the ways of you Tevinters, with your chanting and your blood magic. So you will hold your tongue, or I will gut you like a fish.”

Felix doesn’t even dare swallow. He glances at Carver, trying to hide his terror, and Carver looks back implacably. “Felix, relax. It’s all right.” He speaks as if to a startled animal, but for whose benefit Felix isn’t sure. “Serrah, he spoke the truth. We are Grey Wardens, but I suspect that you are not, if you weren’t aware that the false Calling engineered by Corypheus has been dispelled.”

The assassin pauses. “You are well-informed, for all your blundering. Identify yourself.”

Carver dips his chin in the slightest approximation of a bow. “I am Ser Carver Hawke, Lieutenant of the Grey, based out of Ansburg in the Free Marches. Until recently I served directly with Warden-Commander Jean-Marc Stroud, though we were on the run from our fellow Wardens for much of that time.” His lips twitches with satisfaction as the blade at Felix’s throat recedes an inch. “You know my name, then. Perhaps I know yours?”

The assassin snorts, but does not move his dagger any further. “You may guess if you like, little Hawke, but I think I will not be surprised if you know it.”

“Zevran Arainai,” Carver says, enunciating carefully, “it’s good to meet you at last, even under circumstances such as these. My sister has spoken well of you.”

The assassin—Zevran, a name that Felix vaguely recognizes—cocks his head consideringly. “And where, then, is Stroud? And who is this? I do not recall any Tevinter Wardens taking up the cause of the Calling.”

Carver sighs. “I fear that Stroud is dead. He fell at Adamant, defending the Inquisitor from the Fear Demon that held the Wardens in its grip. And that,” he nods to Felix, “is Felix Alexius, only recently made a Warden, but he has served honorably and well in the time I have known him. I would much appreciate it if you would release him.”

At long last, the dagger leaves his flesh, and Felix sucks in a steadying gust of air, scrubbing with his gauntlet at the place where the poisoned blade had lingered. The stranger steps away and pushes back both hood and mask to reveal brown skin, pointed ears, and soft, fair hair, bright as spun gold. The left side of his face is marked with swirling ink that shimmers in the twilight as he looks between them with narrowed honey-brown eyes.

“My apologies, Ser Felix, for my… overzealous caution,” he says lightly. “I espied your earlier dark magics and assumed the worst.”

Felix clenches his fist, remembering the blood he’d spilled for the sake of their safety. “It was intended to cloud our passage from the minds of the darkspawn here, but I’m afraid it backfired. They cannot sense us, but neither can we sense them.”

“A difficult obstacle indeed, and one we should not try to tackle here.” Zevran turns on his heel, but Felix has the feeling that it’s more a show of his own powers of perception than a display of trust. Even facing the other way, Felix can feel the weight of the elf’s focus bearing down on him like eyes on the back of his head. “I have a small camp not far from here, as safe from darkspawn forays as I can make it. We can speak in more detail there.”

Felix looks instinctively to Carver, who gives a brief nod. “Thank you, serrah. We would appreciate your help.”

Zevran ignores this, leaving Felix and Carver no choice but to follow. The rogue moves soundlessly in the gathering dusk, effortlessly evading traps and pitfalls left by the darkspawn, and they are hard pressed to keep him in their sights. But at last they come to a narrow cleft in a cliff-face, hidden by a slanted boulder and a carefully-arranged screen of deadfall, and within they find a nicely-sized cave warded over with protective charms and glyphs of repulsion. Felix skin prickles as they move over them, but they are allowed to pass unharmed.

In the middle of the cave, the assassin awaits them. The space has clearly been in use for some time, with a neatly-swept floor, two bedrolls, a rack for drying animal skins and herbs, and a sturdy fire-pit over which a hare roasts slowly in the coals. Zevran loosens his cowl and drapes it over a rock before sitting upon it, legs folded in a neat pretzel as he regards them with sharp eyes.

“So,” he says, taking a knife from his boot and setting to sharpening it, “what brings two upstanding Wardens such as yourself to this charming part of Thedas?”

Carver sets his sword by the entrance to the cave before sitting cross-legged on the floor. Felix copies him silently, still a little shaky from the close brush with agonizing death. “We’re looking for the Hero of Ferelden,” Carver says, and the elf’s mobile features go still and smooth as beveled glass. “I had hoped to find her alive and well and in charge of Weisshaupt Fortress, but that appears not to be the case.”

“Clever Hawke,” Zevran murmurs. “You are correct on that count, alas. My dear Tabris and I arrived in the Anderfels only a month ago to find Weisshaupt in darkspawn hands, and of the Wardens who inhabited it we could find no trace. Tabris has had dealings with these creatures before, but something has changed since her years as Warden-Commander. Their master would not see us, and he sent his mindless drones out in packs to hound us. We were intending to mount an expedition of stealth to see what might have become of them, but she was captured a fortnight ago and in that time I have gotten no closer to finding a way inside.”

“What do you mean?” Carver leans forward, hands digging into his knees. “Are you saying these darkspawn are Awakened?”

Zevran nods to Carver, a weary bow of his head. “It is so. The Architect has taken control of Weisshaupt for reasons unknown to us—I tried to tell my Warden that he was allied with Corypheus, but she would not hear of it. And now I fear she is paying the price.”

“The Architect?” Felix echoes. He knows the name, and the story attached to it—it was a long way from Adamant, and Carver had many colorful stories about Grey Warden life. “But how is that possible? I thought he lived in the tunnels below Amaranthine. Surely a talking darkspawn can’t just take passage on a ship like normal people.”

“The Deep Roads are a web that spans much of Thedas,” Carver says, and Zevran nods in agreement. “But I think the more pertinent question is _why_. What does Weisshaupt have that he so badly wanted?”

“Such is the question that Ilyn and I wished to uncover. Yet now I cannot even be certain whether or not she yet lives.”

Carver gestures to the room they sit in, with all its trappings of living. “You hardly appear to be a man who’s given up hope.”

“Given up? Certainly not,” the elf snaps. “I will free my Warden from their clutches or die trying. But I must be realistic—I am no Warden, as you so astutely pointed out, and I cannot risk infection for there is no one here to perform the Joining should I suffer contamination. I don’t suppose _you_ have a solution to that particular problem?”

“I do not,” Carver says regretfully. “Stroud carried some of the Joining blood on his person for emergencies, but it’s in the Fade with him, now.”

“Alas. I suppose it was too much to hope for. But,” and Zevran’s crooked mouth parts in a smile, “now I have been gifted with two allies who need not fear the taint as I do.”

“What of the other Wardens?” Carver asks. “There were thousands living in Weisshaupt, or so I was led to believe. So _Stroud_ believed.”

“Stroud was not wrong, once. When I journeyed here with Ilyn we believed the Wardens here to be secure, not fallen to the corruption that Corypheus was wreaking on the Wardens of the South. I still do not know the full truth of it, but I have seen no Wardens since we came to the Anderfels, and that in itself is cause for concern. The Blight has never really left these mountains—the people are hardy warriors as well as farmers, for they must fight of roving bands of darkspawn year after year while the rest of Thedas rests on its laurels. The lack of Warden presence here is… troubling, to say the least.”

Carver exchanges a look with Felix. “So, what’s the plan? I’ve heard enough stories to know you’re not one to sit idly by while others have all the fun.”

Zevran grins wolfishly. “You are not wrong. And my fortunes have begun to look up, it seems. Come, rest your feet and fill your bellies, and we will plan together.”

///

It is a good plan, Felix thinks. Zevran has uncovered a culvert in his wanderings, one of the many drains that carry the waste and snowmelt away from Weisshaupt, and if they can get inside without attracting attention, it will guide them through the sewers and into the bowels of the fortress where they can work their way up. With Felix’s cloaking spell and two Wardens to back him up, Zevran is confident of getting inside. The difficulty is the timing. The Crow is more comfortable passing unseen by night, but their enemies see best in the dark, so they must make their move by daylight. Carver argues for evening while Zevran declares that morning will be best, and after a half-hour or so of debate Felix settles the argument by siding with Zevran. Stranger he might be, but his tactical knowledge is broader and more… subtle than Carver’s brazen warrior instincts.

Carver sulks for the rest of the evening while Felix picks Zevran’s brain on what to expect from fighting darkspawn. For all he’s a Grey Warden, the elf has seen far more battle with the twisted creatures than Felix has. Perks of living through the Fifth Blight, Felix supposes. Afterward, he sidles up to Carver, who is staring blankly into the fire, and nudges him with his elbow.

“Stop that,” Carver mumbles, and pushes back, lightly enough that Felix knows he’s at the end of his tantrum.

“You’re still my favorite,” Felix teases. He ducks Carver’s more pointed swipe and grabs him around the neck with his arm in a light chokehold.

“I could break your arm with one blow, you know.”

“And I could set your pubic hair on fire with a thought,” Felix says lightly, and giggles at the twin expressions of horror that cross his companions’ faces. “Go to sleep, dog lord, we’ve a task for the Void tomorrow.”

With some grumbling, Carver settles into his bedroll while Felix takes first watch. He trades off with Carver, and then some hours later is shaken from a light slumber by Zevran. Milky pre-dawn light filters into the cave along with a thick, cloaking mist, and Felix takes it as a good omen. His hands are steady as he buckles his gambeson into place and straightens his tabard. When Carver passes him his staff, their fingers brush, and Felix trades him a small, hopeful smile. Surely the Maker is on their side.

The morning is chill and tinged with the bitter smell of snow. With every exhale, Felix’s breath blooms white in the frosty air, and the lowland swamp crunches underfoot as they make their way to the culvert. Zevran takes the lead, hooded but no longer masked, and in the mist he becomes no more than a wraith, a bobbing muted shape hovering just out of sight. Carver comes next, even harder to see in his silverite plate. The blue of his tabard blends in with the murk, and Felix must rely on sound alone, following in his footsteps with his eyes trained on the ground and his ears pricked for the slightest change of pace.

His toe catches on a root suddenly, wrenching him out of his focus. The splash of his boot breaking through a thin layer of ice and into a puddle seems unnaturally loud in the predawn quiet. He grips his staff hard in both hands and breathes. _Focus_.

Carver and Zevran have disappeared, but he can hear the soft rustle of their footsteps and follow the scuffs in the frost that limns the desiccated grass. He winds on this way for a few long, lonely, mist-cloaked minutes; the fog only seems to get thicker and whiter as the sun clears the ridges to the east, and it pearls on his armor and slides down the back of his neck like sweaty, clammy and unpleasant. Where is Carver? He can barely hear his footsteps now, the sound by turns amplified and muffled in the eerie pall of fog. He dare not call out for fear of being heard by less friendly ears, and he picks up the pace. And stops. His toe slides off the edge of the earth, and below, invisibly, a canyon yawns, prickling the back of his neck with its vastness. He catches his breath and backs away, shaking. Damn him, where is Carver?

He senses the surge of taint a split-second before the rag is pushed into his face. He flails wildly, struggling, trying to lurch away from both darkspawn and cliff, and then the herbs and trace magebane soaked into the cloth catch up with him, and he is swallowed by blackness.

* * *

Carver realizes something’s wrong when they reach the bottom of the valley and Felix isn’t behind him. The way down was precarious, but hardly deadly—the path curved and shunted unpredictably, but with one hand on the cliff-face and an eye to his feet, he’d reached the bottom safely enough. Before them, out of the roof of the thick cloud that wreaths them, Weisshaupt rises black and foreboding. Behind is silence.

“Fuck,” he whispers, and Zevran materializes out of the fog. “Where’s Felix?”

The elf’s eyes are blank with carefully-concealed worry. “I thought he was right behind you.”

“So did I.” Carver hesitates, looking back up the few feet of path he can make out. “I’ll go back, just to check. Just a minute or two.”

“We cannot delay,” Zevran begins, “but neither can we progress without him,” and that quiet addendum saves him from a punch in the face. Carver cannot bear to hear Stroud’s final words quoted back to him from this sharp-tongued assassin. He _will_ not bear it.

“Wait here for me, and don’t move.” Carver turns and takes the trail back up, huffing and puffing in his heavy armor at the climb. He stumbles once or twice, and the spidery scrape of pebbles tumbling back down the way he came clutches panicked fingers at his nape. “Fee, Void take you, where are you?”

The cliff-top, when he reaches it, is empty. The fog thins around him as the sun reaches higher in the sky, but it reveals no clues. Not so much as a scuff-mark remains. Determinedly, he swallows back the cold lump of fear in his throat—Felix  hasn’t fallen. _That_ would have been unmistakable. A scrape of stone, a shout, the clang of armor and the crunch of bone—

Carver bites down on his tongue, hard, and the sting and the blood wipe his mind of the horrible visions. He has to concentrate. _Think._

He is glaring at the suspicious snap of a twig when Zevran steals up beside him, face pinched. “There was no sign of him below. I fear this is precisely what occurred the day Tabris disappeared.”

“No,” Carver growls, no longer caring if they’re overheard. “They have _not_ taken him!”

“Do not be foolish,” Zevran hisses back. “If he _has_ been taken, we cannot delay trying to look for him here! It is all the more imperative that we enter Weisshaupt undetected.”

“And do what? Without a mage, we’re hobbled—they’ll see and hear us coming for miles, no matter what we do.”

“You, perhaps,” Zevran drawls. “With your big shiny Warden armor clanking a hundred miles off.” A queer look steals into his face and he grabs Carver by the pauldron. “Perhaps I have stumbled upon a solution.”

Carver grits his teeth. “Does it involve burning Weisshaupt to the ground to rescue Felix and Tabris?”

“Not quite. But as you say, we are short a mage—therefore we must find ways to counteract that. And you, my friend, must divest yourself of your precious plate armor.”

“If you’re trying to get into my pants, Zev, let me tell you, this is not the way.”

“Hush. Now is not the time for joking.” He cocks his head, cornsilk hair falling away from the delicate arching point of his ear. “We must go now, before the scout patrols discover us. Do you trust me?”

Carver scowls. “I suppose I have no choice.”

“There, my friend, you are correct. Come, this way. The peat bogs will have what we need.”

Dubious, but out of options, Carver reluctantly turns his back on Felix and follows him into the swamp.

///

The creature knows who he is. His family, his history, his every childish fear and teenage crush; the long, horrific battle with the Blight eating at him from the inside; the blood rituals his father performed to force his failing body to live another day. The creature is curious. For the sake of knowledge it tells him, as it strips the flesh from his bones. Will you sacrifice your health to the Warden cause? Your sanity? Your self? Felix cannot answer, and the creature takes his silence as consent. He bleeds for a long time, in the dark, and he cries for mercy even when he has no voice.

Time stretches with no meaning, and months or maybe minutes later he opens his eyes to bright light—a magelight, fair and bubbling as a sprite, and by its glow a woman bends over him, dressed in rags and striped with pale scars that glow against her dark skin. She cradles his head in her lap, infinitely gentle, and for the first time in so long his body feels no hurt.

“Are you a spirit?” he whispers, unable to fathom any other reality. She smiles, and her eyes glitter with unshed tears.

“Close enough. Sleep now.”

He does sleep, with her warm hands on his face and her low, humming sing-song lulling him through the darkness. But he doesn’t sleep forever. He wakes alone on the cold stone with voices ringing in his ears, clashing like swords that shed no sparks: “You’ve nearly killed him twice over! You must not draw from him again, or your precious experiments will be for nothing. Take my flesh instead, I give it freely. Just leave him alone.”

“I cannot, Warden-Commander,” is the sibilant response, clipped and precise, thick with the tongues of old Tevinter. “He is of my blood, and his flesh is still of use to me. Stand aside. I do not wish to strike you down.”

“What do you mean? Because he is Tevinter?”

“That is part of it. But more than that, his blood carries the burden of the Call with greater ease than any other Warden I have met. I am determined to know the cause—it could be instrumental in my studies.”

“You’ll never know the cause if you don’t give him time to rest. It’s only been two days. Surely your curiosity can wait a little longer.”

There is a long, considering silence. Felix holds his breath and hopes.

“I am sorry, Warden-Commander. This man is the last step between me and my goals. If my work demands his life, so be it, but I will have answers. Now _stand aside_.”

His heart quavers in his chest. The woman responds, subdued but still audible, “I will not.”

“I do not wish to kill you. You have been my ally for many years, and so I will give you one more chance. Do as I ask. This man’s life and blood are mine.”

Felix doesn’t hear the answer—it is drowned out by a bestial roar that seems to shake the very foundations of his cell. His cheek grinds helplessly into the cold stone and he prays. _Maker, let it be Carver_. There is a cry, and the measured, implacable voice says, “Come. We are hunted.” And then Felix remembers no more for a little while.

///

Carver fucking _reeks_ , but it’s been with him long enough now that he barely even notices. It’s a small blessing, anyway, as the foul waters of the sewer kick slop around his ankles. His leather boots are barely up to the task—they cling to his calves and slip-slide against the drain floor, unusually light without his greaves buckled overtop. He wishes he’d followed Zevran’s example and brought along a walking-stick.

Ahead of him, the elf drops into a crouch, and Carver copies him. The pale light of the overhead grate flickers, flakes of rust drifting down like snow as something stomps over it with vigor. Carver shakes his head. No respect for architecture.

He resists the urge to scratch himself and picks himself up again when Zevran straightens up. Like the elf, he’s wrapped in rags and plastered with peat mud, prickly thorns and deadfall vines trawling over his body like Chasind-style camouflage. He’s not nearly the shadow that Zevran is, clinging to the darkest corners of the sewer and melting into the swamp until he’s just another part of the landscape, but he’s not bad. And if darkspawn have any sense of smell, at least he’ll be indistinguishable from the brackish waste water that ripples around his ankles with every sludgy step.

The tunnel is long and low-ceilinged, lit only by the occasional grate that drips on their heads as they pass, and it curves unpredictably, following the whims of the rock and earth it was carved into. Carver’s neck is beginning to ache as they finally find the end: a flat stone wall nearly eight feet high, with a few broken-off bits of wood where the rungs of a ladder once fit into the mortar. Carver’s lips pull back from his teeth in a silent curse, but Zevran is already moving. He leans his staff against the wall and jumps lightly up, catching hold of one of the rotted wooden spikes. With his toes, he wedges his weight into the slippery crevices in the stones and pulls himself up. He slips only once, near the top where the age-old drip of water has worn a shallow trench in the ledge above, but he throws one hand up to grab the stone lip and hovers there only by the strength of one arm, breathing heavily.

“A little help,” he whispers, and Carver comes forward belatedly to boost him the rest of the way. The elf slips over like an eel, and Carver can hear soft splashing and a muffled curse before he returns, head and shoulders backlit by the soft glow of whatever lamps burn beyond his line of vision. “You next.”

Carver eyes the wall dubiously. There’s no way. But he grabs the staff, and heaves himself up, toes slipping and straining to hold his warrior’s weight—Zevran leans down to meet him, and between the shared length of their arms, the elf gets a good enough grip around Carver’s cloth-wrapped forearm to haul him up the rest of the way.

“You’re stronger than you look,” Carver mutters, and gets a look around.

They’re in some kind of massive drainage chamber. The ceiling vaults overhead, greenish-gray with moss and collected slime, with a massive grate set into the apex that allows a little light to filter through. Crumbling brick struts curve along the walls at even intervals, separating the small grates that mark the places where all the drains in the fortress converge. The culvert Carver and Zevran entered by is one of three, all of them sitting well above the pool of dark, sludgy water sitting in the middle of the room where months, perhaps years, of waste have collected and never drained. Carver wrinkles his nose.

“Charming.”

Zevran rubs his hands together. “Now to find the weak spot.”

They edge around the circumference of the pool, held a comfortable handspan or two above the surface by the narrow ledge that encircles the sewer. It only takes three tries before they find a grate that’s rusted away enough to serve. Carver grits his teeth and kicks the bars until they crumble, trying not to flinch at the scream of old metal giving way underfoot.

“Hopefully no one heard that.”

Zevran does not reply, simply ducks into the tunnel—even lower than the first, beautiful—and leads the way. It grows very dark very quickly, and Carver decides to be grateful that he can’t see whatever slops and squishes underfoot.

The first evidence of darkspawn habitation is the fleshy putrescence that begins to creep along the walls the further they go. Then the sounds: the dragging footsteps, the chittering that sends chills down Carver’s spine, the snarl and snap of infighting and the guttural, half-insensate growls of the alphas subduing their simple-minded charges. The filth below their feet becomes more recent and more pungent, and Carver gags into his elbow, trying not to retch. Ahead, Zevran turns and holds a warning finger to his lips. _Nearly there._

They pass two exit points, but neither are usable. One refuses to budge, the iron bars set too deeply into the stone, and the other opens into an armory full of squabbling darkspawn. Carver keeps his head down as they pass, well below their line of sight. His heart burns. Those foul creatures have no right to bicker amongst themselves about the distribution of Warden armor—they have no right to even _look_ upon it. His hands shake a little as his control slips, but he breathes deeply and the awful pong of the sewers clears his head. Not yet. He cannot lose himself yet.

Suddenly Zevran stops, so abruptly that Carver nearly mows right over him. The elf grabs at his arm, fingers digging cruelly into the unprotected flesh of his inner elbow. “Stop,” he breathes, and points ahead. Light, filtering through a crack in the wall. Some sort of hidden entrance, perhaps? And beyond it, voices. Carver follows him—he has no choice, with Zevran hanging onto his arm like a leash, and he a dog—ears straining.

The words are muddled, but the voices are clearer than any of the guttural excuse for language the other darkspawn have exhibited. They ring apart distinctly, one feminine and husky with fear and sorrow, the other cold and measured as a drumbeat. Zevran bows his head.

“Tabris.”

Carver reaches for his sword. “What are we waiting for?”

Zevran shakes his head, the anguish in his face illuminated by the thin strip of light that fans out from the crack in the wall. “You are unarmored. I had hoped to find a storage room of some kind before we face battle.”

Carver shrugs him off. “I’ll figure it out.” And before Zevran can voice any further protest, he braces himself pommel-first and rams the wall with a bellow of uncontrollable rage.

He has never been more grateful for his berserker training. The anger and the momentum marry to become an unassailable force, and his body is carried through the brick-and-mortar in an explosion of dust and broken stone. The room he bursts into is long and narrow, reminiscent of a barracks dormitory, but the piles of scavenged Warden armor and the barred cells that line each wall say otherwise. At one end a door is cracked ajar, revealing more cells; at the other, a towering darkspawn stands at the base of a winding staircase, its claws curled possessively around the neck of an elf dressed in rags. Her bare feet dangle and kick helplessly as the creature stares at Carver in something like surprise—or so he imagines, though it’s difficult to tell with the upper half of its face hidden behind a mask of smooth, unblemished gold.

“Ilyn!” Zevran shouts, his voice strangled by the dust that chokes the air. In a flash the darkspawn releases his captive and grabs her by the scruff of her rough canvas tunic instead, shoving her up the stairs and out of sight.

Carver grabs for Zevran’s arm as the elf dives toward the stairwell. “Wait!”

“That was Ilyn,” he snarls, ripping his arm free, but he stays himself from running after them. “The Architect has her. We must pursue them.”

“Just a minute. There are Wardens here.”

The cells are fairly spacious, lined with thick bars, and Carver looks into each one with growing desperation. There _are_ Wardens, but many of them are nothing more than corpses, pale and bloodless, their desiccated bodies smelling only of dust and mildew. There is a ring of keys hanging on the wall, and Carver snatches it up as he searches for a familiar face. All of them wear the embroidered tabards of the Weisshaupt Wardens. None of them are Felix. This does not make him feel any better.

“Hello? Is someone there?”

Zevran darts ahead, peering into a cell that’s larger than the others. “Here! Some yet live.”

Three men and two woman inhabit the cell, all of them thin with hunger. Carver unlocks the bolt and they limp out one by one, shaking and grateful, determination burning in their hollow eyes. “Thank you, serrah, for your timely rescue—”

“I’m looking for another Warden, not of Weisshaupt,” Carver says, interrupting the stern, grey-haired man who seems to be their leader. “He was captured by the darkspawn two days ago.”

“A new prisoner was brought in around that time,” the man agrees. “Who knows what the Architect wanted with him, poor soul, but it bought us a few days’ respite.”

“Respite from what?” Zevran asks.

For answer, the man pushes up the sleeves of his tabard, hanging loose from his frame without the chainmail and gambeson underneath. His forearms are littered with scars, white and pink and made in neat rows along the ropy protrusions of his veins. “He wants our blood, for what I know not. I suspect your friend has suffered a similar fate.”

Zevran takes the key ring gently from Carver’s shaking hands. “Are there more of you?”

“There were, once. I hope there are some that yet live.”

“Take these.” He passes the keys to him. “Free the survivors, and arm those who are able to fight. We will need every able body if we mean to retake the fortress. We leave their command in your capable hands.”

“Understood. And your names, serrahs?”

“Warden Carver and Zevran, at your service,” the elf says smoothly, glossing over his own lack of title. “We are allies of the Hero of Ferelden.”

“I know that she is here, but I do not know where. If you will excuse me, I must see to the arming of my men. I wish you luck in your search.” He glances at Carver, who is still trying to get a handle on his rage. “I am Ser Jacen, Captain of the Grey. May the Maker guide your steps that we may share a drink when this is done.”

Carver nods brusquely and turns away, letting Zevran make their goodbyes as he tracks down some armor that fits and buckles it securely into place. There is more searching to do.

The dungeon has many levels, each holding more Wardens—some living, but many more wasted away from the blood rituals inflicted on them. Carver passes them by. None of them hold the only person he seeks. Zevran, impatient, trails behind him nevertheless, and at last they come to a narrow corridor lined with cells that are far more cramped than any of the ones previous. All of them are empty, but there are scuff marks in the dust that blankets the floor, and the scent of fear and the copper tang of blood are thick in the air.

The last cell in the row is not like the others. Instead of bars, the door is made of solid iron, and it fairly glows with the layers of protective enchantments folded into it. There is no sign of a key.

“Void take it,” Carver spits, and reaches for his sword.

“Wait.” It’s Zevran’s turn to stay Carver’s hand, and he does not quail when Carver rounds on him with a horrible snarl. “Patience, warrior. There are other ways to open locked doors.” And from his belt pouch he pulls a skeleton key, long and intricately carved, with a tine runestone set into the handle.

“Where did you get that?” Carver breathes.

“The ring of keys I gave to Ser Jacen. I suspected it would unlock something special, and it seems I was right.” He passes it over, and Carver snatches it from his hand without a word. It fits perfectly into the keyhole. The door swings open.

Inside there is a man, naked, curled like an unborn child on the cold stone. In the light of Zevran’s torch, Carver can see a familiar delicate wrist, the back of a close-cropped head, but his mind rebels at recognition. This cannot be Felix, bruised black and blue, his back a mess of crisscrossed lashes that still ooze blood sluggishly. Without his Warden gear he is terribly thin, a skeleton bound by torn flesh—his ribcage heaves unevenly with every breath, and when he pushes himself up clumsily to peer at them from the safety of his straw-strewn corner, Carver sees a ghoulish flash of the man he had once been, steeped in the ugly throes of blight sickness.

“Maker’s breath,” Zevran whispers.

Carver steps into the cell with careful, quiet steps, wary of startling him. And yet when Felix lays eyes on him, his mouth splits in a bloody grin, and his breath bubbles hoarsely as Carver bends over Felix’s broken body, trembling with helpless rage. “I knew you would come for me.”

“Of course I came. You idiot.” He doesn’t know where it’s safe to touch. He settles for cradling Felix’s head in his hands, guarding it from the cold stone floor as best he can. “I’ll always come for you.”

“I know.” He’s still smiling, as if his body isn’t broken and bruised almost beyond recognition. Carver’s eyes fill with red.

“Zev, take him.”

Zevran asks no questions, just slips to the floor and lets Carver transfer Felix into his lap. “And what of you?”

“I’m going to go and kill the bastard who did this.”

He doesn’t hear what Zevran says in reply—it doesn’t matter. He hears nothing but the blood pounding in his ears, feels nothing but the rage boiling in his veins. He is going to slaughter every last darkspawn he sees, and that is the only thought in his head as he bares his blade and steps forward into the bowels of the fortress.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I played a lot Skyrim today, so if you're short on visuals for the sewers, just thing the Ratway cistern :P Also--this Tabris is a mage, just for funsies. Her mother was an apostate and trained her to wield and hide her magic along with some roguish skills.


	3. the duty that cannot be forsworn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before I forget again: the "theme song" for this fic is, unsurprisingly, Sons of War by Two Steps from Hell. Epic music is epic. Warnings for this chapter include, again, blood magic, references to torture, violence, and trauma recovery.

Terror seizes Felix as Carver disappears, and he clings to Zevran’s forearm like a vise. “We can’t let him go by himself.”

“Agreed,” Zevran answers grimly. “But neither can I leave you.”

Felix struggles upright, crying out involuntarily at the pain. “My… clothes are in the next room. The shirt can be used for bandages.”

Zevran stares at him in amazement. “You have just been beaten within an inch of your life and you think to offer him aid? You cannot even _stand_.”

“Watch me.” Using Zevran’s shoulder as a starting-point, he levers himself up in a sort of crouch. His back and shoulders scream at the exertion, and his legs shake dangerously, but he stands. “My staff, elf,” he gasps, hating himself a little for the ingrained nature of the command. “Please.”

Zevran shakes his head, but he moves like a shadow into the next room. He returns with Felix’s things, and passes the staff over first. Felix leans heavily on it as Zevran begins tearing his undershirt into long strips, and then as he wraps his battered body, sealing away the blood behind soft cotton. Over this he dons his tabard and leathers—the chainmail is too heavy and chafing to wear, so he leaves it regretfully in a pile in the corner.

“Come,” he says. Then, “Please, Zevran,” when still he hesitates, and there’s something like pity on Zevran’s inked face when he nods.

“Very well. But we stop when I say you must rest, and you will not put yourself forward in battle. Stay behind me _always_ , yes?”

“Yes,” Felix rasps, in unwilling agreement.

It’s easy to follow Carver’s trail. It’s a fierce and bloody one, strewn with dead and dying darkspawn. A few materialize to cause trouble, but between them, Zevran and Felix make short work of the stragglers. Weak as he is, Felix has enough spirit in him to do considerable damage. Every step away from that dreaded cell is a fresh pulse of mana back into his bones, and he wants nothing more than to conjure a blade and pierce the heart of every darkspawn that dares to lay a hand on Carver Hawke. But Zevran maintains an iron hold on him, always forming a barrier between Felix and any stray darkspawn they encounter, and at precise intervals they stop so that Felix can regain his breath and replenish his mana.

As they go, the sounds of battle begin to drift back to them. Felix longs to be there, in the thick of it, but Zevran holds him steady. At last Felix wrenches free and nearly collapses against the feeble support of his staff. “How can you do this?” he demands, nearly crying at the ache of his cracked ribs. “It isn’t just Carver we need to protect, it’s _her_. How can you leave her there to her fate just to coddle _me_?”

Zevran’s full mouth goes flat and expressionless. “It is because of her that I remain with you, Tevinter. As she once gave me a second chance to prove my worth to her, so I will give you the same courtesy. Do not make me regret my choice.”

Felix wants to argue the point, but the pull to follow Carver is stronger. Reluctantly he allows Zevran back beneath his arm, and they stagger on, hobbled but still dangerous.

The passages of Weisshaupt are tricky and winding, hewn directly into the white rock, and the chill sinks deeply into Felix as they force their way through the carnage. Behind, they can hear the surviving Wardens girding themselves for battle and the darkspawn gathering in the bowels of the fortress, chattering their war cries and scraping along the walls like skeletal fingers on stone—ahead, Carver’s mindless cries of rage and the clanging strike of steel on steel as he carves a path through those that oppose him. Felix feels like a dust mote trapped between two tremendous forces, fighting towards the light but ever hounded by the shadow. He grasps for some semblance of awareness, but the tangled paths of the fortress are like something out of a familiar fever-dream, and as he stumbles on he could swear he feels the floor give way like flesh beneath his feet.

Like a many-legged monster from a children’s bedtime fancy, they lurch suddenly into an open chamber lit from above by deep slits cut into the rock. Felix flinches against the brightness, turning his head into Zevran’s collar, and the elf pushes him onto a marble bench pushed against the wall. The room swims before his eyes as Zevran crouches in front of him and grips his knees.

“Felix,” the elf says, and his voice is a deep, sonorous echo that sounds more like the bones of mountains grinding against each other than any human tongue. “I am going on ahead. You will be safe here—I have locked and warded the door behind you, and whatever is ahead will fall before us. Stay, rest. We will be back for you. We will. I swear it.”

* * *

Carver does not remember the battle, after. He has given himself over entirely to the berserker rage, and it consumes him like a fire, directing his limbs and the turn of his blade, glinting red along the fuller as the blood of darkspawn coats the sword, the walls, his borrowed armor. He is wounded many times, but the fire burns hotter. He stumbles once, a cudgel coming down hard against his ear, but his rage consumes the pain.

His last foe falls with a squelch as his blade leaves its stomach, blood and viscera slopping out onto the floor. It’s a very nice floor, clean white limestone, free of the fleshy, malodorous taint that has overtaken the rest of the fortress. Carver stares at it, and a little of the red fades from his eyes. He looks up, along a narrow aisle flanked by hardwood pews intricately carved and polished to a high shine by centuries of penitents, and into the face of Andraste.

He has never much liked the look of her, all pious and untouchable on her golden pedestal of flame. But she focuses him now, so out of place amidst the carnage. His anger burns lower in his breast than before—it recedes from his feet and the tips of his fingers, and he has enough wherewithal to pause, to breathe, and listen for the sounds that rage on the other side of the wall.

He is in the chapel, he sees now, standing before a little wooden door that leads to a prayer chamber or perhaps an office. Beyond some sort of ruckus is being raised—he can make out the clangor of splintering furniture and the sizzle of spells, and a gruff, feminine voice barking out curses in butchered elvhen. Carver looks down. The darkspawn he has just slain lies propped against the threshold, mouth agape and tongue hanging loose against its chin. Carver tips it over with his sword, leans back, and kicks down the door with a grunt and a shatter of wood crumpling under his foot.

His dramatic entry hardly seems to interrupt the tableau at all: a lithe, nut-brown elf balances on a heavy oak desk strewn with scattered alchemical equipment and ruined books, grappling with a massively tall darkspawn. Red magic leeches from her hands into the twisted flesh of its face, and its arms flail wildly, raking long claws indiscriminately over her arms, face, back, thighs. She clings to it like a leech though he twists and shrieks, and then there’s a horrible wet-paper sound and something smooth and golden peels from the darkspawn’s face and skitters across the ground toward Carver. He puts out a foot to stop it—a curved golden mask, curled up at one side like a conch shell. It gleams up at him, baleful, and when he flicks it with his toe the reverse is slippery with blood.

“Now, Warden!”

The speaker is unfamiliar, but the command is not. Carver steps forward lightly, feet skipping against the stone, and springs high into the air. The blade, when it comes down, severs the arm the darkspawn is using to strangle the elf woman and bites deeply into its side with a geyser of black blood.

The pain goes both ways. Whatever dregs of magic the Architect still possesses lance along his blade, tendrils of black corruption that sink into Carver’s hands and stab at his arms and chest. He staggers back, yanking his claymore free, and the connection is severed. But the damage is done—the layers of invulnerability he’s built up through the mounting death toll collapses in on itself, paper-wet, and he shudders and staggers to one knee as his body begins to cave.

Behind him comes a sudden, ululating war cry, and then Zevran is there to take his turn. His blades are razor-sharp and quick, so quick they evade the corrupting magic the Architect tries to turn on him. And then he darts across the room and turns, and both blades leave his grip in a parallel blur of silver, embedding themselves into the darkspawn’s remaining arm. The sickly Void-black anti-light that had been gathering in the Architect’s clawed hand fizzles out.

There is a lot of blood on the floor, dark as the walls of the Black City. The darkspawn is bleeding out. Dizzy with pain, Carver watches as the Hero of Ferelden—for who else could it be, standing brave and straight-backed even in rags before her fallen enemy?—lifts a hand and conjures a paralyzing cage of force magic. The creature moans, low and pitiful, but Carver feels no mercy, only cold, dead fury.

“Please,” he rasps, struggling to his feet. His claymore, notched along both edges with the force of blows through bone, supports him well enough to stand. “Let me.”

Tabris turns to him. She’s impressively tall for an elf, the top of her short-cropped head coming nearly to Carver’s chin, and her purple eyes blaze out of a swarthy face as she stares him down. “Not today, Warden. I am sorry, but he has a purpose yet to serve.”

For a brief, wild moment, Carver thinks to defy her. But Zevran materializes before him, a barrier between his blade and the darkspawn huddled in its invisible prison, and he backs down reluctantly. “Felix?”

“Alive,” Zevran assures him. “And conscious, for the moment, little Hawke. He is nearby.”

A tiny shred of relief worms its way into Carver’s heart. “I must find him—the rest of the battle will reach us soon.”

“The battle is won,” Tabris corrects. In her hand is a small crystal orb, glowing faintly red. Belatedly, Carver recalls seeing her pluck it from among the detritus littering the Architect’s desk. She stares at it intently, seeming to bend her will against its power, but the dim light only flickers slightly in response. “Damn. It’s still bound to him.” Her eyes flick to the Architect, and Carver’s fingers tighten on the hilt of his sword.

“If you would let me—”

“No.” Tabris’ voice is a whipcrack slicing through Carver’s words. “The knowledge he possesses is too valuable. But this is the crux of his control, and his communication with Corypheus. If I can bind the spirits within to me, the darkspawn overrunning Weisshaupt will be under my control.” Her eyes narrow. “Your companion, Ser Felix. He is a blood mage.”

“Felix is no maleficar,” Carver growls, wondering how she could know such a thing. _She was a prisoner, too_ , he reminds himself forcibly, and tries to control his frustration. “But yes, he has experience with blood magic.”

“Then I have need of him. Zev,” and she tosses him the orb. He snatches it out of the air smoothly, unperturbed by the dark magics within its crystalline depths. “Keep that safe. I’ll have need of it in a moment.”

Carver tails her to the door, desperate for some reason he can’t explain. “Please, my lady, he is sorely wounded—”

She rounds on him, mouth firm but eyes suddenly gone thin and stretched with weariness. “Ser… Hawke, was it? I am sorry. I know that Felix has already given much. But if we are to turn the tide of battle and retake Weisshaupt, I must ask him to give a little more. The cause is just.”

Carver grits his teeth against the second half of the mantra, familiar to all Wardens, but it echoes in his head regardless: _and the Wardens do their duty._ An oft-repeated line in the face of the horrible decisions Wardens must sometimes make for the sake of the greater good, and Carver has never hated it more than right this second. But even so. “I will give whatever is necessary. Blood, or otherwise. Just. Keep Felix alive.”

Tabris tilts her head down in acknowledgement. “I will do my best.”

It’s not enough. He wants promises, an oath, he wants her to get on her knees and swear on the graves of her ancestors that Felix will survive this. But she doesn’t, and he doesn’t try to stop her as she limps to the chapel door and steps through it to whatever waits beyond.

* * *

Zevran is gone.

Felix leans back against the wall and listens to the clangor of battle on the other side of the wall: Carver’s familiar bellow of rage, the zap and tingle of unfamiliar magic, and the singing laughter as Zevran joins the fray, twin blades flashing in melodic counterpoint. He can envision it all perfectly, crisp as lines of new paint in his mind. He longs to be there, but he knows with utter certainty that if he were to stand on his own, he would fall. He clenches his fists in frustration, and they are not empty. He looks down.

His staff is in one, its weight propped against his shoulder. In the other, the jeweled hilt of a little dagger, more ceremonial than functional, with a keen, slightly curved edge and a tiny fuller highlighted with gold. His dagger. The one his father gave him when he turned eighteen, an emblem of his eventual rise into the Alexius seat in the Magisterium.

He has spilled so much blood already to the whims of the Architect—for who else could it have been, with the queer golden mask and a voice like an Archon? Felix can’t remember where he got hold of the knife. _Zevran_ , he realizes. Slipped into his palm before leaving him here alone, one last defense should the worst occur. Just in case.

He can’t leave Carver. He has to get up.

He stares at the knife. His staff has left his grip, and now the blade lays naked against his open palm, so close to flesh. The meat of his thumb is rubbed raw from his staff—he hadn’t had time to put on his gloves under his gauntlets. It would be easy to break the skin there, with so much blood already so close to the surface. Become something—someone—who could save Carver. Someone brave. He turns the knife, and the blade lies razor-sharp against his skin.

“Stop.”

A hand closes on his wrist before he can jerk in reaction, and the little knife goes spinning across the flagstones. It isn’t Carver’s hand, or Zevran’s—it is a dark brown hand, long-fingered and wide-palmed but delicate, sprinkled with freckles and wrapped with cloth for a makeshift gauntlet. Felix follows the hand to the arm, bare, to the ragged brown robes, to the narrow face, familiar, peering down at him from what seems a great height.

“Felix,” says the person, the _elf_ , with a rich contralto voice that sends shudders down his spine, “be calm. Carver is well. The battle is over.”

“I missed it?” he hears himself say, and the elf’s eyes crinkle slightly at their well-worn corners.

“I’m afraid so. I doubt you remember me, but we have met before, albeit briefly. I am Ilyn Tabris.”

“Felix,” he rasps, “Alexius. At your service.” She is still staring at him intently, as if judging him fit. He hopes he passes muster. “What happens now?”

“I know you are sorely wounded,” she says. Her touch on his sternum is cool and careful, even through the layers of makeshift bandaging, and a little of the pain eases. _Spirit healer_ , he thinks, though he knows the signs of mana depletion—he has little reserves of his own, but enough to see that she has pushed herself almost beyond her threshold. “I’m afraid I must ask more of you, yet.”

He quails, but rallies to meet the challenge in her eyes. “I am at your command, my lady.” His body is slow to respond as he sits upright, stiff with the wounds that close his torso in bands of steel. Tabris helps him up and together they make up something like a functioning being. Her chest is broad and firm for a mage—or a rogue, he can’t quite make the pieces fit together—and he lets himself lean against her solid weight as she speaks.

“The Architect is subdued, for now, but I cannot maintain the paralysis spell for much longer. We need to bind him with something more permanent. Something that will reinforce itself over time, not deplete.” She touches the bared skin of his right forearm, still bearing the brand of his efforts to cloak them from the darkspawn. “Carver tells me you are a blood mage. I have need of your abilities.”

Felix doesn’t think he’s ever felt so weak. The idea of spilling more blood is laughable. And yet. “I would do far worse to hobble that creature than work a little blood magic. But I will need—more than I am able to give.”

“That is easily remedied. My mana is low, but I bled little in the battle.” Her violet eyes skewer him with their strength of purpose. “Carver has also volunteered to give to the cause, if it comes to that.”

“Carver?” Felix can’t help but laugh, a pathetic little sound that echoes in the vaulted arches of the chapel. “You must be mistaken. He despises blood magic.”

“He despises what was done to you even more.” She gestures with her blunt chin to the cracked doorway where Carver waits. Felix blinks rapidly. He hadn’t seen him there before. He stands in full armor, bloodied and stern, his blade still held at a drooping angle as if he’s forgotten how to let go of it. When Felix meets his eyes, he turns and disappears into the antechamber, leaving him bereft in his absence.

“All right,” Felix says. His voice sounds so distant in his ears. “Let’s get this over with.”

In the little room—an office, once, now a wreck in the aftermath of battle—Zevran and Carver stand above the unmasked Architect, pacing the confines of its crackling prison. Felix can see the threads that bind the spell to Tabris, and he wonders that she is still standing. Together they limp to the edge of the barrier, and Felix can see no trace of the cruelty that had stripped the flesh from his bones and made him scream into the black of his prison cell. Just a crumpled, vaguely human figure, robes in tatters, face torn and bleeding and unrecognizable. He turns away. 

“Tell me what to do.”

“The proper incantations are here.” A book lies unbound on the desk, a grimoire, and it seethes with dark energies that make Felix’s skin prickle. It belonged to the Architect, once—now it is unmastered, and the spirits within are restless. “Bind it to your will, and you will have bound him.”

“ _Him_ ,” Carver spits, and Felix hunches his shoulders against the onslaught of his anger. “That thing is genderless, nameless, faceless. It is only _it_.”

“None of us are _only_ anything, Ser Hawke,” Tabris says in clipped tones, but their argument is distant. Felix leans over the desk and shudders. The grimoire calls to him, tempts him. So much power for such a little price. Just a touch, a drop of blood, and he can have the world.

“My way,” he whispers, calling on a reserve of strength he has worked years to build. The spirits in the book quaver at his touch as he passes his hand over the much-abused spine, the broken clasp with its shattered key lying useless nearby. “You are mine to command, now. Bow to me.”

He can feel the weight of the others’ eyes on him, burning into the back of his neck, but he shakes it aside. The pain that still grips his fragile mortal form focuses him, makes it easier to concentrate on the task at hand. Tabris passes him the knife she had struck from his hand only minutes ago, and he frees the catch to slide it from its little jeweled sheath. Carver makes a small noise, a token protest, but it is too late—the keen edge glides along his arm, parting the skin smoothly, and his blood falls in an uneven spatter onto the grimoire’s battered face. There is a brief contest of wills, his against the spirits (demons) trapped inside, and then he surges forward with a fistful of Fade energy, the proper words falling from his lips, and they are sealed once more in their little paper prisons, bound to do his will.

He looks up, shakily, with the echoes of the grimoire’s shriek still ringing in his ears, and sees Carver blanch and look away.

“It is done,” he says quietly to Tabris, who nods. “Give me your arm.”

The barrier spell is weakening, the glyph of paralysis flickering where it lies embedded in the flagstone floor, but Felix has the knowledge now, the contents of the grimoire settling intimately into the empty spaces of his mana flow. Tabris extends her hand to him and this time it’s Zevran who looks away. “Do it,” Tabris says quietly. Her violet eyes are steady, even if her hand is not. Felix grips her wrist, flicking the grimoire open to the correct page with the tip of his knife, and draws the blade cleanly across her open palm. He presses her hand to the spell of binding marked in careful, block-print runes on the yellowed parchment.

The Architect screams.

They are both swaying with exertion when he finally releases her. Their blood has run together on the page, and it sinks into the grimoire, into the Fade, as Felix speaks the final words of binding. As soon as she is released, Tabris stumbles back and slumps to the floor. Zevran passes her a little crystal orb, which she clutches to her chest as if it were her firstborn. “Is it…?”

“Yours to command. A simple nick will be enough.” He presses the tip of the knife to his own palm to demonstrate. “I will bind the grimoire to you, later, as insurance. But now—” He breaks off and stumbles away from the desk. As soon as his hand leaves the grimoire, all the strength of his body flees, and he sinks the ground in a puddle. The knife falls from his grip and he shudders, holding back bile. “No more. No more, I cannot—”

“Zev,” Tabris snaps, somehow still in command in spite of her ashen face and weak, unresponsive limbs. “The last potion, for the Maker’s love.”

Zevran doesn’t look happy about it. But he comes forward, skirting the prone form of the Architect as if avoiding a pile of offal in the street, and withdraws a single vial of lyrium from his belt pouch. “It is all we have left,” he says gently. “Are you certain?”

“It must be now, or we will lose him, and the spell will be for naught.”

Her voice is fogged in Felix’s head, but he’s still present enough to feel the warmth of Carver’s body as he kneels beside him, bundling him off the floor and into his arms. He sprawls there, content to bleed away. But Tabris tips the vial back and swallows, and mana surges through her suddenly, faint threads of Fade-blue spiraling down her arms and alighting like fireflies at the tips of her fingers.

“My lady,” he whispers. She is a glowing thing, a spirit of mercy bending to take the burdens of his toil from his shoulders. She smiles.

“You have done well, Ser Felix. Sleep now.” A soft purple glow suffuses her face and flows down her arms, and she lays her hands upon his brow. Darkness consumes him, and he sleeps.

///

The rebuilding of Weisshaupt is a slow and gruesome process. The bodies of the darkspawn are dumped into a mass grave at the base of the cliffs and burned, and all the conjured wind in the world isn’t enough to completely preventing the smell of smoke and scorched flesh from drifting through the windows. The Wardens who died in the cells are given a proper Anders burial, burned on pyres atop the mountain, their bodies sprinkled with herbs and powdered perfumes that suffuse the smoke with deep plums and slate blues. The ashes that fall over Weisshaupt smell of sweet spices, and that, too, is part of the cleansing.

The inside of the fortress is a slightly more daunting task. The Blight has infected it from the bottom up, and the darkspawn have left such a foul reek behind that they must scrub for days to be rid of the smell and the stains. But Carver is grateful for the hard labor. It gives him something to do to channel his anger, and wears away that the deep-seeded resentment that was sown when Tabris commanded his best friend to sacrifice his health and his sanity for the Warden cause. A needful cause, yes. But not one Carver finds easy to accept.

The days pass into weeks, and at first, Carver thinks that Felix is okay. He works as hard as any of them, meets regularly with Tabris to check over his lingering injuries, and trades stories around the fire over cards and ale after work hours with the rest. He’s a card shark too, turns out, and he grins irrepressibly with every win, so childishly delighted that hardly anyone can stay angry with him. And Carver, like all the rest, is lulled into complacency. He stops watching him so closely, throws himself into manual labor—he volunteers for all the hardest, dirtiest work, and falls into bed in the barracks at lights-out with hardly a nod goodnight. Slowly, Weisshaupt recovers.

Felix does not.

One evening, a game of cards turns into a storytelling session that drags long into the night. Carver hovers at a pleasant level of not-too-drunk as he listens to Zevran weave increasingly improbable tales about the Fifth Blight. Tabris is a melted sprawl of limbs in her own chair, giggling occasionally, and Carver loses track of time until he realizes Felix isn’t with them.

“He went off to bed a while ago,” Tabris drawls when he asks, twirling her fingers in the air. Carver decides he might as well join him. He makes his good-nights and stumbles down the hallway, acting more drunk than he feels—he lets his body sway pleasantly with every step, fingers dragging along the clean stone wall as he winds his way back to the barracks.

He isn’t really looking where he’s going, and as he rounds the corner to the dormitory, he stumbles right over someone sitting against the wall. He recovers himself with ill grace, mumbling half-insensate curses at the wall, and rights himself tipsily to inspect the damage. The person has hardly moved, seemingly unaffected by his graceless entrance. Carver squints, peering closer. Like a puzzle piece suddenly fitting into place in the midst of chaos, he realizes it’s Felix, dressed in his bedclothes with knees to his chest, rocking slightly back and forth.

“Fee?” Carver asks. He’s really not thank drunk anymore. “What are you doing out here?”

Felix doesn’t look at him. He doesn’t appear to be looking anywhere in particular, just off into space, eyes blank. Carver moves slowly, more from instinct than anything else, and gets down on his knees in front of him, trying to catch his gaze. “Hey. Fee. It’s me, it’s Carver. Can you look at me?”

Slowly, Felix blinks and turns his eyes to him. “Carv?”

“Yeah. Hey. What are you doing in the hallway?”

Felix works his jaw as if contemplating a response. “Don’t like the dark.”

Carver rests his hands on Felix’s shoulders lightly. He’s stiff as a board, but a few moments of careful contact and he unwinds a little under Carver’s touch. “You can conjure a magelight or something, all right? Come on, it’s freezing out here.”

Felix comes slowly but without resisting, like a doll with no direction of its own. Carver leads him between the bunks by feel, counting each bedpost in his head to be sure, and tucks Felix into bed with hands made only a little bit clumsy by the last traces of drink. He doesn’t seem entirely aware of his surroundings, still, but Carver puts it down to exhaustion—they’re all tired, after all, working to the bone to make Weisshaupt habitable again—and he lights a candle for Felix before climbing into his own bed.

Screams wake him out of a sound sleep hours later. He flails upright, adrenaline fighting with fatigue for control of his body. Two beds over, Felix is writhing in his bedding, limbs flailing every which way as two other Wardens try to subdue him.

“Someone shut him up!” someone complains, but it’s lost under the frantic, hiccupping sobs as Felix cries out, delirious with fear.

Carver vaults out of bed, elbowing the other Wardens aside, and gets a kick in the ribs for his trouble. He staggers back for only a moment before he plunges back in breathlessly, fumbling for the flailing arms and finally catching them, holding them against his chest as gently as he can. “Felix, Felix! Shh, listen, it’s Carver, I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

Felix subsides by degrees, black eyes glinting in the light of the single candle someone holds above his bed. The one Carver put at his bedside has long since guttered out. “Carver…”

“Yeah, it’s me. I’m here. You with me, Fee?” He stares into his face determinedly, willing Felix out of the fog of nightmares.

After a long pause, punctuated by Felix’s ragged, sleep-sour breaths and the discontented mumbling of the others, Felix dips his chin. “Yeah. I’m with you.” Carver releases his hands and reaches out to feel the thin skin of his forehead. It’s sweaty and too warm against his palm, and Felix turns his face into it, mouth creasing. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. Come on, the sheets are soaked.”

Felix goes with him, trembling and pale. He lets Carver strip off his sweat-soaked nightshirt and bundle him into Carver’s bed without complaint, and Carver pulls a chair up, wrapping a spare blanket around his own shoulders. “Try to get some sleep. I’ll keep watch.” He glares at everyone else, sitting up in bed or standing around still wary for the next outburst. One by one they turn away, muttering, and go back to bed. Carver sighs and pulls the blanket harder around his shoulders.

From the cavern of his bedding, a pale hand snakes out and grabs hold of his. Felix is watching him, calmer now, his forehead wrinkled just a little with anxiety. “I’m sorry,” he says again, softly. “You don’t have to sit up.”

“It’s all right,” Carver says gruffly. He squeezes Felix’s hand and leans back against the wall. “Sleep, Fee.”

And Felix does, eventually. But that’s not the end of it. Felix manages to sleep through the night for about a week before the same thing happens again, and this time some of the men aren’t so forgiving. Carver gets into a fistfight with Quentin and Bryce the morning after, and Zevran hauls all three of them before Tabris with a scowl of distaste. Tabris looks equally disgusted, and Carver knows he deserves it, but that doesn’t stop him from chewing the other two out as vehemently as he knows how.

“It’s not his fault!” he shouts when Bryce starts making noises about blood magic and abominations. “He’s not a fucking demon, he’s _traumatized_. He was in that cell for two days being ripped apart by that monster while the rest of you faffed around in your cozy dungeon—”

“Ser Carver—”

“He’s not at risk for possession!”

Tabris is like stone, unflinching, as she lifts one hand to delicately wipe away a fleck of spittle from her cheek. “I will overlook your indiscretions this once. I understand that tensions are high, and that our daily work is gruesome and wearing. However, I will give no second chances. I will have utmost obedience from you, as Wardens of the Grey, or you will be punished appropriately. Ser Carver, I will have you and Ser Felix moved from the common barracks until the night terrors abate. No more petty squabbling, from any of you. Is that understood?”

“Yes, First Warden,” they chorus, properly chastened. Carver is still shaking with rage, but he swallows it down, bows, and leaves her office in a rush.

He stops short. Standing just outside the door is Felix, pale and tired, hands folded neatly in front of his tabard. “Felix.”

“Excuse me,” Felix says quietly, and goes into the office, sidestepping Bryce and Quentin as they emerge, shamefaced. Carver wants to punch something. Again. Instead he drinks in calm, focusing himself like a drizzling mountain stream, and goes to find a practice dummy to vent his rage.

* * *

Tabris invites him into her office with a warm smile that’s eerily at odds with the coldness he heard in her voice mere moments ago. Felix ducks inside and closes the door behind him, meek as a churchmouse, and sits in a chair when she bids. Instead of facing him across the breadth of her desk—no longer stained, but oh, Felix swears he can smell the sick tang of his own blood congealing on the surface—Tabris comes around to sit beside him in the other chair and folds her hands in her lap.

“You’ve been having trouble,” she says, not unkindly.

“Yes.” He hates himself for it, for his weakness. And as much as Carver tries to help (and often succeeds, true), the First Warden is the only one who truly understands. “I’m sorry to bother you—”

“You aren’t bothering me. You’ve earned the right to come in here whenever you need.”

“The right,” Felix scoffs. His fists clench on his thighs. “Earned it how? By being… being _helpless_ , by letting him into my head, letting him take whatever he wanted—” He chokes off, rubbing his mouth to keep more words from spilling out unchecked.

“Felix.” Tabris looks strained as she takes his hands in hers and unfolds them, forcing the joints to relax. “It wasn’t your fault. It didn’t happen to you because you were weak, or lacked conviction—I fell victim to his wiles just the same as you did, and other people paid the price for my mistakes. _You_ paid the price.”

“If it’s not my fault, it isn’t allowed to be yours, either,” Felix remarks.

“Hmm. Up for debate.” She smiles, though, as she releases him and goes to rummage in her desk for something. She returns with a small clay pot in her hands, which she passes to him. “Elfroot balm, for your scars.”

Felix takes it and twists open the wide cork. It smells clean and fresh when he lifts it to his nose—not flowery or spicy, not like anything in particular, but the soft tingle of elfroot reaches his nostrils and seems to clean through his sinuses like a fresh breath of air. “This must have taken a great deal of time and effort to make.”

“It won’t last forever,” she warns, “so use it sparingly. I thought it would do you some good to have a degree of… independence, from me. I am not your keeper, Felix.” At his subtle flinch, she touches his wrist lightly. “No one is.”

“I know that,” he says after a long silence. “Thank you.” He replaces the cork and slips it into his belt pouch. “If I may ask…”

“Anything. But I cannot promise to answer.”

“Fair.” He takes a breath. “You and Zevran…”

She quirks an eyebrow at him. “We’ve made no secret of our relationship, not to the other Wardens and certainly not to you and Ser Carver.”

“I was wondering, does he—help? When the memories are too much, or when… when the nightmares…”

“Yes. Always. He has suffered too, in his life, and that shared pain has brought us closer. I hate what was done to him, as he hates what was done to me, but it’s easier to bear our burdens when we shoulder them together.”

Felix bows his head. “I don’t know if Carver has ever… been through… that. But he tries.”

“And does he succeed?”

“Most of the time.”

“Then that is all that matters.” She tilts her head, eyes sharply violet on his face. “Ser Carver may not have been held captive and gone through the trials you have suffered, but that does not mean he is incapable of loving you the way you deserve.”

Felix’s cheeks flame. “I don’t—he doesn’t—” His protests fall flat, so he swallows them back. He knows only what he hopes and longs for, a small spark he nurtures against the tide of the dark, and time will tell whether or not they fan into flame. “Thank you, First Warden. For your encouragement. And the salve.”

“Just Tabris,” she says kindly, repeating, “I think you’ve earned that right.”

* * *

Carver is still in the practice yard when Felix finds him later, stabbing halfheartedly at the shredded remains of a straw dummy. Felix makes no move to join him, only sits quietly on a rough-hewn bench at the edge of the ring, and Carver glares at the bits of hay scattered beneath his feet. Sod it.

He slings the blunted practice sword to the ground and stomps to the edge of the ring, recalcitrant as a child, and flops down onto the bench. He suddenly feels disgusting—damp with sweat and dusty from the hard-packed earth he’s kicked up, his shirt soaked through and open at the collar like a slovenly drunk. He tugs at the laces ineffectually before letting his hand drop in defeat.

“We’ve been assigned new quarters,” Felix says when he’s got out the last dregs of his tantrum. “I can show you, if you want. They’re quite nice.”

Carver frowns and rubs at a blister that’s forming at the base of his thumb. “Are you upset with me?”

“No, not really. Upset with myself.”

“For what? None of this is your fault, Fee.”

“I should be able to control myself better than this,” Felix says, voice gone brittle. “I walk the Fade every night—I can turn aside a demon without speaking a word, or bind one to my will with a gesture. This… should be nothing.”

“But it _is_ something,” Carver ventures.

“Yes. I am fighting it, but. It’s not the sort of battle I’m accustomed to.” Felix squeezes his fingers together in a tight knot, gazing keenly across the empty training ground. “I argued with her that you should be allowed to sleep with the others. This isn’t your fault any more than it is mine. But she refused. So now I can blame that on myself as well.”

“If I hadn’t started a _brawl_ , perhaps—”

“For my sake!” Felix interrupts sharply. “Maker take you, Carver, it wasn’t worth it. _I_ am not worth it. You’re one of the senior officers. You need their respect, and I am… undermining that.”

Carver feels the growl building in his chest and forces it back down. “What have you heard?”

“I didn’t…”

“No. It wasn’t just eavesdropping on us in Tabris’ office—which, fair enough, I was sort of shouting. Loudly. But before that.”

“I may have heard a bit of what was said, before you started… ah, punching people. Bryce.” A faint sort of smile finds his mouth. “It’s not the first time someone has accused me of demon possession, and it certainly won’t be the last, even in the Wardens. It’s a hard prejudice to overcome, and as long as there is even one maleficar running rampant and destroying everything they touch, the rest of us will fall under their shadow.” His hand comes down on Carver’s shoulder, sweaty and clammy as it is, and squeezes. “You don’t need to defend my honor, Carv. In fact I’d prefer if you didn’t. I will prove myself to them under my own merit, or not at all.”

Carver bows his head. “I suppose so.”

“Come on, then.” Felix stands and stretches, arms reaching toward the far-off vaulted ceiling before dropping again with a sigh. “Let me show your our rooms before lunch.”

They’re nice rooms, Carver has to concede. They’re just a little ways down from the common dormitories, and clearly meant to serve as officer’s quarters—but they’re only recently cleaned, still musty in the corners with dust and abandonment, and they feel a bit cramped in comparison to the rest of the barracks. There’s no running water, only a small room off the bedchamber with room for a tub and buckets for hauling water, but it’s theirs, and it will do. They scrounge two cots from a storage cabinet and pile them high with blankets and furs, and when Carver cleans out the flue the fireplace burns well and cozily. They both sleep through that night, and the next, and Carver almost begins to hope that Felix has begun to find healing.

But it’s only a temporary reprieve. He’s dragged out of sleep by panicked cries a few nights later, and Carver has to light several candles and cradle Felix in his arms for half an hour before he finally calms enough to sleep again. The next night is peaceful, and then the one after that Carver wakes to muffled sobs and the faint smell of urine. He helps Felix change the bedding in silence, ignoring his pathetic apologies, and wonders how much more they both can take.

When Felix wakes up screaming for the fifth night in a row, Carver knows they cannot stay. They are both suffering for it, now, but Felix most of all. By day he works his hardest, but he drags, head bowed and eyes bruised with sleeplessness, and his spells are weak and hollow as his mana fluctuates under the weight of stress. He barely eats, even with Carver’s encouragement, and his robes begin to grow loose on his already whip-thin frame. Sometimes Carver loses track of him, and when he finally finds him again he’s lingering by the stairs to the dungeons, something like horror and twisted fascination in his face, as if he desperately wants to go down there but is too terrified to take the first step.

One evening, Carver walks out of the washroom after a lukewarm bath to find Felix perched on his cot, shirtless, staring down at his bare torso. The scars have faded to thin pink lines that encircle his body, little tracing threads crawling over his chest and stomach and thickening to fat ropes and gouges along his back and shoulders. When he sees Carver looking he dives beneath the covers and rolls over, the tip of one ear barely showing above the furs. Carver blows out the candle, and says nothing.

The next day he goes to Tabris. Her office is finally in some semblance of order, the bookshelves tidied and catalogued, the desk scrubbed free of stains and polished to a high shine. A thick rug cuts the chill of the flagstone floor, and Carver stands to attention upon it as he makes his plea, staring not at her but just over her left shoulder as he begs her to send them on assignment—into the hills to root out the last dregs of the Architect’s failed empire, to scout out deep roads entrances, _anything_. Anything to get Felix away from Weisshaupt, where so many terrible memories linger.

“I can do you one better,” Tabris says evenly. She looks at him from across the minefield of her desk, littered with enough magical artifacts and ancient scrolls to make Carver’s palms sweat, and sets out a sheaf of new paper with compassion in her face. “I need someone to send word of what has happened here to the Grey Wardens in Ferelden and in the Free Marches. I cannot trust the safety of a simple courier, and I will not send Zev by himself, so I want you and Felix to escort him.”

Carver reels, his mind following the path such a trek would require. The journey would be a month at least, requiring travel overland as well as by sea, and he can’t even begin to fathom the route or the expense, let alone the danger they would be in. Corypheus and his minions were still at large, and the last Carver had seen of the Wardens at Ansburg had been a swift and bloody one, slipping free in the dead of night after killing two senior Wardens in self-defense. He doubted he would be welcome back, even bearing the seal of the First Warden.

But, “As my lady commands,” he says, swallowing his fears, and Tabris nods in approval.

“I will provide you funds to make the journey, and a pair of messenger ravens for your use. Zevran is known to the Wardens at Ansburg and Amaranthine, in particular Warden-Commander Howe of Vigil’s Keep. Considering him your letter of recommendation, should they be slow to trust my seal.”

Carver bows, fist to his chest Ferelden-style. “And when we have delivered your message?”

“You are Ferelden-born, are you not? I will leave it to Nathaniel’s discretion, of course, but I will recommend you be reassigned to Amaranthine. I know your time at Ansburg was… cut short, and that there may be tensions concerning your continued service there. Perhaps, considering your history with the Inquisition, you can serve as liaisons for the Grey Wardens—but that can be decided later.” She pulls a blank square of parchment toward her and begins writing in a smooth, straight script. “You may begin preparations to leave as soon as you are ready, Warden Hawke. Come and get this from me before you leave, and let no one read it but Warden-Commander Howe.”

“Ser.” He bows again and leaves the room, feeling heady with relief. Finally, a new task. A new journey. He can almost taste the clean sea air on his tongue, can smell the sick-sweet petrichor of Ferelden in the fall, leaves musting in the rain and wheat gone fallow in the field. He clenches his fists in a small token of excitement and turns on his heel. He has to go find Felix.

///

The late Autumn sky stretches over the dark teeth of the Anderfels, pale and austere as a Chantry initiate and dusted lightly with torn-silk clouds. Below them yawns the vast slopes of the Brecon Hills, broken by silvery fingers of snowmelt converging on the plains and flowing far out to the Nocen Sea. To the south and east, faded to smudged purple by the haze of distance, Tevinter sprawls like a great indolent cat, rich and fat with the fruits of late-summer harvest. Felix takes in a deep breath and can almost taste the warmer, sweeter air of the lowlands, carried in by the ocean from Seheron.

Beside him, Carver lets out a deep sigh of contentment and shoulders his pack. “What a view. Can’t wait to be in it.”

Zevran stands from his crouch, raven held neatly against his chest with leather-gloved hands. “I estimate a two-day trek to Vol Dorma, and from there a river-boat should get us to Asariel by week’s end.”

Carver eyes the bird, its black eyes bright and sharp, feathers ruffled against the mountain cold. On one leg, a small tube contains a brief message written in a shorthand known only to a few. “Will she get our message by then?”

“I hope it will be so. She frequents the waters near Par Vollen this time of year. Good slaver-hunting territory.” Zevran’s grin is knife-sharp and dangerous. “If we are lucky, perhaps we may partake in the hunt.”

He lifts his arms and in one smooth, harmonious thrust of his body, launches the messenger bird into the air. It taken flight with a hoarse caw and spirals out over the foothills in lazy loops until it’s no more than a speck. And gone.

Felix has a sudden, inexplicable urge to take hold of Carver’s hand. He’s so broad and implacable, steady as the butte they stand upon, ready to plunge over the edge and walk a thousand miles for the sake of duty. He watches him frown out over the landscape with his chin jutting ominously, and warmth wells in his breast. At least if the way forward is unknown, Carver Hawke will walk it at his side.

He puts his thumbs in his belt. One day, he will be brave enough.

 

end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It didn't quite make it into this fic, but Tabris, apart from being an apostate, is a trans woman. I couldn't find a way to squeeze it in that wasn't borderline disrespectful, but it will come up in later installments in this series.

**Author's Note:**

> Please note the tags, there are graphic descriptions of blight/taint/everything to do with darkspawn, including mental repercussions of blight sickness. Also violence, blood, self-harm as it relates to blood magic, and references to torture, although there are no graphic depictions of it.


End file.
